


the garden at the edge of the sky

by Nautica_Dawn



Category: InuYasha - A Feudal Fairy Tale
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, F/M, Original Character(s), Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Temporal Paradox, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2021-02-06
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 35,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26289670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nautica_Dawn/pseuds/Nautica_Dawn
Summary: Time magics always come at a price.Or: after three years of being stranded in the future, Kagome returns to the past.
Relationships: Higurashi Kagome/InuYasha, Kohaku/Rin (InuYasha), Miroku/Sango (InuYasha)
Comments: 40
Kudos: 69





	1. the sky returns

**Author's Note:**

> For Sara, without whom I never would have written this.

She can see the sky.

That impossible—no, not impossible, that’s just what it looks like without the pollution isn’t it—blue, lightly painted by brushstrokes of white clouds; it’s above her for once and fear pushes her to scramble up vines because no way is she letting this thing drag her back.

Not now. Not again. Not when it has _finally_ worked.

It’s been three years, near to the day. Three years of prayers, of dreams so sweet and soft they tore her to pieces. Three years of a life without color. She’s tried so hard to not count the seconds, after the first year. Tried even harder after one year rolled into two. By the time three rolled around…

(It’s been two years, eleven months, sixteen days, and based on the light somewhere between three and five hours.)

Mama tried so hard to keep her spirits up. Calmly teaching her to sew, and teaching her recipes that made Jii-chan go soft because he hadn’t had them since his own grandmother made them over half a century ago. Most of it had been presented wordlessly, just passed off as the whims of a housewife. Like the garden started near the wellhouse where the shade of the Goshinboku would shelter the tender plants. Or the encouragement to do laundry by hand outside ‘ _because the weather is so nice’_ even though the modern appliances were working perfectly. She’d even managed to goad Jii-chan into giving calligraphy lessons every Sunday evening.

Not once had her mother ever wavered in her faith that everything would work out; that either the well would reopen, or that he would find her on the other side.

But three years, and he never did. Souta and Jii-chan had walked carefully around that topic, towards the end.

There’s a stab of guilt somewhere around her stomach. She’d left without saying goodbye to either of them. It had just been Mama, who helped her sling the bow and bag across her back and then helped her up to stand on the lip of the well with the words, “ _Go, and be happy_.”

Maybe someday she will have her mother’s strength. Even now she can aspire to that, can’t she? Five hundred years before her mother’s birth. A second stab, that thought brings. More guilt she really doesn’t need, because the last three years have been a mire of sorrow and pain and guilt.

She tried. Honestly. To be a good daughter, to be a good modern girl interested in modern things. To focus on building a life on that side of the well, where it was too noisy and smelled. Where she couldn’t see the stars and where she felt like the walking dead.

Sometimes she’d wonder at how like Kikyou she must have been, trying so hard to remain calm and feeling so utterly alone most of the time. Being so _lost_ , where she recognized so much and yet it was all so foreign. If nothing else, the last three years have smoothed the worst of the lingering darkness from that particular mess. It ruffled everything else, pushed it to breaking, but at the very least it doesn’t hurt to think about the miko’s shade anymore.

What still surprises her the most about the destruction in the Tama’s wake is how _quiet_ most of it was. At least the bits in that now distant time. She had looked for any mention of the Shikon no Tama, of the various battles they fought because how did the likes of Naraku and Sesshoumaru, both with such a flair for dramatics, manage to leave no impression on humanity?

And on the personal side, what it did to her was quiet. So quiet she didn’t even notice most of it until it was pointed out. The inability to sleep, lest she dream. The loss of appetite, the loss of color in the world around her. The creeping unease when surrounded by humans because what if they turned…

It took a long, long time to realize that her social circle had somehow become majority youkai and even without them there was a deeply rooted fear of being in densely populated human areas because _what if._ They’d never spoken of it; the things villagers would sometimes say, but it was still enough to put her on alert every time she was around strangers.

It had made her a terrible friend, in the future. Ayumi and the others—it had been hard, trying to relearn them and finding them lacking. They had none of Miroku’s charm and wit, none of Sango’s sharp edges masking spun-sugar sweetness. Growing up, was what Ayumi had called it, trying to soften the blow to the other two when they thought she couldn’t hear.

Not that she could, but Akari could. That one stings, a little. Unless the well has screwed up and opened at some other time and please, _please_ don’t let that have happened, then Akari is now a little girl, somewhere out there. Older than Shippou, she thinks, but only by a few decades.

She’s incredibly thankful for her time with the fox. Maybe that farewell that final day at the temple will suffice. Akari did so much to keep her on level ground, mentally, is the one who kept her alive when things were at their bleakest, is the one who introduced her to Shikako after realizing she needed training. Hurting Akari is the last thing she wants to do.

(Three years and the old witch actually won the battle against being called sensei or oba-san, as would be appropriate. There’s a softer stab at that loss, because Shikako is somewhere out there but an adult and more than once she’d wondered if the witch knew her from the past.)

She pauses long enough to adjust the bow on her back. It’s been so long since she’s tried to balance her gear with a bag slung across her back, but here she is and the unbalanced saddlebag sits like one of Shikako’s mad trials.

Climbing trees using barriers in ways she’s pretty sure they were never intended to be used, or rock climbing with cuffs that cut her off from her power entire. Sometimes with sandbags across her back, sometimes with very unbalanced jugs of water instead. And once with Akari in her true form, the not-so-little fox curled around her shoulders. To say nothing of archery; she’d done archery club in high school and Shikako had gleefully enforced archery using her power in her daily drills.

It’s just…

 _Three years_.

She doesn’t lose her grip on the vines, but the reminder of how long it has been does make her stop.

It’s been three years.

Unbidden the memories of Mama finding the remnants of old records and the carefully written history within come up, bitter as bile. She knows how much can change in three years. She’s changed, and so has everything else. The records had covered her human friends and oh how it had _hurt_ , seeing in stark black ink the confirmation of their lives and deaths like that. But of the youkai…

Of Inuyasha, there had been _nothing_.

She knows him well enough to know staying in a human settlement is not something he would do, really. Always too restless, always too wild; he’d hated sitting still for extended amounts of time during that long year searching for the shards. Waiting three years would be—

Would he wait? Were the last three years as hard for him as it was for her? She’d checked the well every day. Every morning, every evening, sometimes late at night when she’d wake from dreams of what could have been and jumped down trying to dig her way to where it wouldn’t hurt anymore. She’d cried herself to sleep both in and by the well at least once a month, often when the sky was black for the lack of moonlight. She’d screamed, cried, begged the well to reopen, to _send her home_ because home was him and the thought of a life without him was more than she could bear.

Was it just her, though? Just the silly imaginings of a fifteen-year-old in love for the first time? Did she really mean so much to him that he would wait after so long? Or would he believe she’d done her part and was no longer a part of this world? It wasn’t like he hadn’t been willing to walk away from her before. He had, almost, until she flipped the script. She’s still certain of her choice, of course. Even if…

Even if things don’t work out, she tells herself, there are places she can go. Places that at this time in history could use someone like her. Shikako was cagey with information about this era, but between her and Akari she’d figured out enough to know where’s safe. She knows she’s in the right era, feels it down to her bones. It’s just that life without Inuyasha is still not something she wants to think about.

She’ll do it if she must; she just needs to know he’s safe, wherever he may be. Needs to know there is at least a chance to see him again.

A shadow falls across her and it’s just a shade too dark to be anything natural. While the vines are more abundant than she remembers, three years isn’t enough time to have any trees grow up enough to block the well, and the clear sky above her means the wellhouse has yet to be built.

Except the sky is no longer clear above her and she nearly loses her hold on the vines for it.

 _Three years_.

It’s been three years, and yet…

A clawed hand reaches down into the well and she climbs the small bit she needs to reach it.

—

Inuyasha stays close all day. He tried to back off once, when the news started spreading further through the village and more and more people came to see her, but the second he moved far enough away she couldn’t feel the heat of his body is the second panic bubbled up in her chest like _don’t wake up please don’t let this be a dream please please_ —

She hadn’t dared look back at him. Couldn’t, because if this was just a dream _again_ , she _couldn’t_ —

The faint brush of claws against her back brings her back above water. He’s there. It’s okay. This is real, right? She can only just feel the claws through the layers of her clothing. She leans back a little into the touch and is rewarded when his hand more fully settles on her back, anchoring her a little more in the here and now.

Shippou retreats to her arms soon after. Whether that’s because he could sense her distress or because Miroku and Sango’s girls were making a run at his tail for the third time in what couldn’t be more than an hour, this time with reinforcements in the form of other village children, she isn’t sure. She won’t question it either. The last kitsune she’d been around being Akari, who is—was? Will be? —nearly old enough to be considered an adult. It hadn’t been the same as Shippou’s little weight, nor his familiar warmth.

It helps ground her a little more. The scratch of coarse fur against her sleeves, the little claws too small to do any real damage, all little details that had faded over these last few years.

“Are you okay?” Green eyes peer up at her, full of concern. A rush of warmth comes up from her heart, pushing away some of her darker shadows.

She smiles. It feels a little rusty at the corners, but it’s genuine and a knot of pain slowly unfurls itself. When she next breathes, it feels just a little easier. “I’m fine.”

And it’s true. When she’d dream about coming back, it wasn’t like this. Her mind never got the little details right and she has to focus on them to keep reminding herself that she’s awake. That this isn’t a dream. That this won’t be another awful night where she wakes up alone and remembers the well—the well opened. It let her through this last time. It let her _come home_.

This is real, she reminds herself. This is real. This is happening.

Her smile widens a bit, the tangled thorns she’s been choking on these last three years starting to crumble and fade. It doesn’t fade entirely; she’s had enough dreams where she lived days in the past, or carried with them the sense that she’d been there for months or years, that the fear of waking up lingers at the edge of her mind. 

Sango sits to her left with a misty smile and little Hisui on her lap. The twins (pink is Ayaka and green is Natsumi, right? She thinks that’s right) have been picked up by their father from where they had been pouting at the loss of prey. Natsumi in particular keeps sending her the scrunched up looks of a disgruntled toddler. Her sister is a little more curious, tucking herself against Miroku and peering out every now and again, dark eyes focused on where the newcomer sits between the village’s resident youkai.

 _Three years_. She was only gone three years and they already have as many children. The records had been damaged, for the first few generations after them. There was just enough to know they’d had children, not how many or any names. She isn’t entirely certain what she had been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

But Sango and Miroku’s family don’t hold her attention the way they probably should.

She can’t quite focus on all the information coming her way, and after three years of friendship with Akari and what little information she could glean about whatever led to youkai retreating from human lives she’s more alert than she remembers being in the village.

And it pays, in a way.

The old man beside Kaede had been introduced as the village carpenter, Takenosuke. She vaguely remembers him from those early days when the village was cleaning up from Mistress Centipede, leading the other men in repairing the various structures the youkai had destroyed. He seems genuinely happy to have her here, having shot a knowing look at Inuyasha that left her with quite a few questions.

Rin, of all people, settles at her right. Inuyasha had quietly explained that Sesshoumaru had arranged for her education to be seen to by Kaede while on the walk from the well. The girl looks to be around ten or eleven now, still small, but brightly spirited and wearing a vivid purple silk kimono that stands out among the rougher linens the villagers wear.

Rin’s presence is a blessing she never expected. When she’d dream, it was never of Sesshoumaru’s little girl, and the clear bit of a growth the girl shows is another obvious change from her memories. In her dreams, everyone remained largely the same, frozen in the same moment her heart was even as the dreams tried to trick her into thinking time was moving.

For the rest, the reactions are rather more tempered. A few have asked if she intends to become the new village miko, sometimes with an edge of judgement. One or two have asked questions she doesn’t understand, but elicited low growls from the hanyou behind her and an intervention from Miroku. Many have thanked her for her role in Naraku’s defeat, and the destruction of the Shikon no Tama, saying nothing more than their gratitude.

The ones that she keeps watching, though, are the ones that don’t approach. She only maybe-sort of recognizes them. It’s been three years and even then, she wasn’t in the village for extended periods of time. The few times she was, she was usually only with the four people closest to her.

One she’s fairly certain of is the family of an elder. She remembers seeing the old man with the walking stick talking with Kaede once. She’d not heard the words at the time, but Inuyasha clearly had and he had not been pleased with whatever it was he’d heard. It had been the same expression he got when in strange villages that whispered of dark miko and inugami: a carefully neutral face but with lowered ears and a tension along his spine.

There are a handful of others. They often don’t stay long, and several she doesn’t recognize at all. Those are the ones that send a tendril of fear down her spine.

Shikako had always refused to teach her anything of this era, and Akari had trouble recalling the details of her childhood after nearly five hundred years. But there was enough to make clear that _something_ had happened, and that the threats they faced in the future were threats in this era as well.

She just doesn’t know how much of a threat, yet. The exact year the well opened to was never exactly clear, and there’s been a calendar change between now and then. What threats she needs to be worried about are unclear without that information.

Shifting Shippou in her arms, just enough to move herself so that the bag against her legs falls a little more firmly against her. The books within press back through the dark canvas. Careful volumes filled with her notes from classes with Shikako, and the few lessons Akari had been able to give her, as well as the lessons with Mama and Jii-chan.

She thinks of the white tiger crest the kitsune had sketched out in warning, the colors it may accompany and what they mean written out beside it.

It takes what feels like an eternity for everyone to filter away and return to their chores, though it couldn’t have been more than a scant few hours. Long enough to further quiet that voice in her head that told her she was only dreaming. When she dreamed, the villagers were only ever faceless shadows in the background. Assuming they were there at all; many of her dreams never left the forest.

Rin is among the last to leave, cheerful to the end as she runs off to fetch some things for Kaede’s dinner. By then Shippou has drifted off asleep in her arms as the twins are slowly nodding off in their father’s hold, and little Hisui sleeps sound in his mother’s.

It hits, then, this new reality. Sango is a mother. A wife. Three years and _so much_ has changed and it finally hits that they have moved on. She can already feel in her bones that the history they had of camping in the wilds and the quiet promise to teach her how to hunt when things calmed down is over; likely ended as soon as the well closed, given how old the twins seem to be.

There’s a bitter bite of something, there. The bit that calls up memories of sitting together in hot springs and talking like sisters who would go through all of life’s changes together. But three years apart, and she’s still at the beginning while Sango has built herself a life.

So much has changed, that darkest voice whispers, is there still a place for her?

A hand rests on her arm. Sango looks like she’s trying to find the words, a faint pinching forming on her brow. Something sinks a little at that, because only a few questions could produce that expression in these circumstances, each one more bitter than the last.

“How long are you staying?”

 _Oh_.

That one should have been the obvious one. The bag at her feet likely raised a few questions, and it’s not like she really had the time to explain things before the excitement started. Small children who had no idea who she was, or why she was so close to Inuyasha, and then what felt like the entire village.

Inuyasha and Miroku have both gone too still, both obviously listening for her answer. That…is rather scarier than it should be. Inuyasha was at the well, waiting. He’s stayed so close she can feel the heat off his body, and the weight of his hand. This is going to work out, right?

She made the right choice, she reminds herself. She wasn’t really living on the other side. She wasn’t happy. This is home, has been for longer than she’d like to admit.

She’s _home_.

Tears sting and she breathes deep to hold them back. “Forever,” she says, trying hard to keep her attention on Sango, who herself looks on the edge of tears. “This was kind of a one-way trip.”

Sunlight slants crisp and clean through the village. It’s beginning to melt into evening, now, and she can hear the distant murmur of people finishing up their work. Some birds still sing, and somewhere a dog barks. They’re all gathered on the front steps leading up to the shrine, with Kaede’s house an easy stone’s throw away. She can hear a girl humming nearby and assumes Rin has returned from wherever she ran off to.

She breathes deep, closing her eyes to the light. The air is almost sweet it’s so clean, and carries with it the faint smell of flowers, forest, farm animals, and a unique tint her memory quietly reminds her is the nearby river. 

It’s all so different.

Good different. After…just after, the city had begun to grate her nerves. Too loud, too bright, and smells that had never bothered her before suddenly stood out as unnatural. The stars had vanished from the night and there’s a wobble behind her ribs at the thought of seeing the glittering river once again.

The hand at her back moves, trailing up and around. Claws brush against her neck (how many times did she dream this? How many? How many times did she wake up alone? _please don’t let this be a dream_ ). She tilts to look at him, just as he reaches her jaw to turn her towards him.

She’s dimly aware of Miroku clearing his throat and declaring it best that he and Sango return home to prepare dinner before the children awaken. The world’s kind of fading out a bit as it all falls away, save Inuyasha and there’s the fear, because this is what happens, isn’t it? It all falls away until it’s only him and then she wakes up.

( _please don’t let this be a dream_ )

But it doesn’t feel like a dream. She can still feel Shippou’s weight in her arms, the coarse fur of his tail brushing against the fabric of her sleeves with every breath. And breathing she is; she’s never breathing in her dreams. The spring sun is still a little too warm on her jumper, or maybe that’s the weight of the moment because for all the times she’s remembered it, it’s far more intense now.

There’s a vicious cold that reaches in when she realizes she’d been forgetting the color of his eyes—the exact shade of gold, like late summer sun shining through honey. And the precise red of the fire rat and how that contrasted with the silver and gold and the sunkissed warmth of his skin. He’s near blinding now, so vivid and so alive.

So real.

He’s _real_.

Everything goes a bit blurry as her heart skips a beat. He’s real, this is real, she’s not asleep.

She’s not asleep.

“Can I stay?” she asks, quietly, hoping he understands. She remembers asking the same thing so long ago in another moment that felt like the world was only them. Means the same thing as then, too. She chooses him, as she always has. Chooses this, them, to be together.

 _Always_. 

The next thing she knows, he’s sitting around her, tucking her in close as red sleeves swallow her up. For a moment she expects—something. She’s not sure what. Inuyasha has always been physical, better at situations when there’s something to _do_.

She feels the bag at her feet move, and what sounds like her bow and arrows being picked up. She almost asks, but then they’re in the air, the village shrinking beneath them. He lands at the edge of the forest before moving them quickly through the green.

Familiar, but different. She remembers being carried like this thousands of times in that long year, but when she thought of being carried by him after the world went dark it was always the other way; tucked across his back, jumping through trees and mountains and nearly soaring through the air. Running free and wild and happy.

This is better, she thinks. Better, because this time she won’t be waking up alone.

( _hopefully_ )

He comes to a stop in a small clearing in the depths of the forest. She takes a moment to orient herself, spotting the Goshinboku and from there realizing the well is—they’re where the storeroom is, five hundred years in the future. If she almost closes her eyes, she can see the house she grew up in, and the fence, and the shrine itself.

There’s a house where the storeroom will be. Small and wooden, a little different from the ones in the village they just left. It’s charming. It sits peacefully in the golden glow of the forest, perhaps a bit lonely like it’s waiting for something. Something that looks like it may have been a garden patch is nestled along the left side of the house, a bit of fencing cutting it off from the wilds just beyond it.

“Inuyasha?” She isn’t entirely sure of what to make of this. She doesn’t remember there being a house here three years ago, and there had been times when she’d mapped out the shrine here. Just as in the future, when she’d mapped out the village to find some precious landmarks time had erased.

(She’d found Kaede’s home, by then a bus stop. And Inuyasha’s preferred lounging tree, which had been replaced by someone’s house. She’d even traced the steps to Kikyou’s grave, only to find it in an alleyway where weeds struggled to grow up amid the concrete.)

He’s nervous, isn’t he; the familiar stance settling in at the shoulders and the inability to meet her eye. It makes her feel all of fifteen again. For just a breath, the three years of darkness fade away and nothing has changed. Just for a breath, though. Yet as familiar as this is, it’s not quite the same. He’s not slouching the way she remembers, and he’s not moving away from her as he once did.

It comes fast, the realization that for all the changes, they’re more or less at square one again. 

She loves him. Knows it to be true deep at the core of her. It’s a fact that echoes in her power, flows in every part of her, and stayed the one bit of solid ground she had when the centuries tried to drown her. There is no future for her that does not include him. Wasn’t that what carried her home? What reopened the well when hope was taking its last breaths? That single truth that there is nothing for her in a world without him.

But they don’t know each other anymore, do they?

She’s not the same person she was when she made the last wish. Things she can do that she couldn’t do before. Things that have shaped how she sees the world and feels about her place in it. She grew up in the light, but came of age in the dark. She hasn’t tried to see where all the changes are, mostly for fear of what she might find.

For him there is perhaps less; he was already starting to settle down with his rough edges smoothing out, and it hurts that she missed whatever it was that finished it.

Hurts more at the thought that her absence may have been what did it.

There’s a moment of doubt. The voice in her head that kept her going through the darkness tells her he hasn’t changed _that_ much. That they’re still more or less the same as they both were when the well closed.

That he picked up her bag and bow isn’t unusual. He was already doing that, long before the darkness came. That he’s staying so close to her is normal; remember how rare it was to be truly out of reach of each other, both on and off the battlefield? They’re just picking up where they left off.

What is different is when he quietly takes the sleeping Shippou from her, nestling the kit carefully in one arm while the other comes around her back to gently push her forward.

“Home,” he says, simply.

That younger her goes silent. This is different, this is…exactly what she came back for. _Please don’t let this be a dream_ , she prays, _and if it is, please don’t let me wake up_.

“It’s perfect,” she tells him, cutting him off when she can see the questions and doubt start to creep in. It’s a familiar expression, that is. That downturn at the corner of his mouth, the darkening of his eyes. If she were to look up, would his ears have fallen back and to the side the way they used to when he was second-guessing himself and their relationship?

“You haven’t even seen the inside.”

“It could be a cave or a campsite.” Deep breaths, she reminds herself, when the warning bells start going off because if this is a dream, then she’s about to wake up and the world will still be colorless. _Please don’t_ , she prays, again, begging, _I don’t want to wake up_. “It’s ours. That’s all that matters.”

The house is simple, albeit nicer than what she was expecting. Sliding doors, three rooms it looks like, and some carefully constructed features that could only have come from someone who had seen the house she grew up in. There’s little in the way of furniture, but what there is nothing she would have expected to find in this sleepy village.

She’d done something akin to living history with Shikako once, at the witch’s insistence; one summer that now seems less like a teacher encouraging their student’s odd interests and more like the woman knew the whole truth and thought it would be good practice. It was a festival thing done at the main Alliance school, and it had been the one time she actually interacted with the main body of who would normally be Shikako’s students. It had been fun; showing cooking techniques, being free to use her own bow, and talking more freely about the legends she’d lived through.

Akari had given her odd looks through most of it. She hadn’t remembered until after that Akari was in fact old enough to have lived through the battle with Naraku, but if the fox made any connections between her and the stories, she was never entirely sure. Nothing was ever said. Not that Shikako ever explicitly said anything either, despite never hiding the fact that she was more than old enough to actually remember the Shikon no Tama and its bloody path through history.

“Did you build this?”

The nervousness returns. He sets her things down by the door, careful of the still sleeping Shippou tucked in by his left arm. Sure enough, his ears have fallen down and slightly to the side. It’s almost enough to make her smile, until she realizes she’d been forgetting how mobile and expressive his ears are when one of them flicks a little.

“Yeah,” he says, still not looking at her. “The old man, Takenosuke, decided I needed something to keep me occupied. He suggested doing this to practice so I wouldn’t muck up the roofing next time he needed help.”

“Inuyasha, this is amazing.”

And it is. Her grandfather had found his way of helping her by introducing her to the antiquities he loved. He’d taught her how to recognize the work of a skilled craftsman with an expert’s eye she hadn’t expected him to have.

What she’s looking at is _good_. The kind of good that takes time and lots of practice to do. The kind of good that comes from having way too much free time.

Like three years too much.

She thinks of all the notes tucked away in her bag, and everything she learned in the mad rush to train her. It really is the same, isn’t it?

He takes Shippou into one of the rooms, and when she peaks around the corner to see, she realizes it’s a small sleeping room with a futon perfectly sized for the kit. Somehow the little boy stays sound asleep as he’s put to bed, and all the stranger because it’s _Inuyasha_ doing the tucking in. Gentle and calm, like this is something that’s happened before. Clearly has, because there’s a row of toys on a low shelf and…

“Has he been living here?” she asks, voice kept low so as not to wake the child. It feels too much like she’s intruding on a private moment, like this is a—

It looks like a father putting his son to rest.

It’s like there isn’t a place for—

“Hey, stop that,” and he’s so close, hands at her face and delicately wiping away—tears. She was crying? When did that start? “Kagome, look at me.”

Words are getting harder, everything all smeared together in her mind.

Because…

Because everyone has moved on. Life goes on, and things change and where does she fit into this? She couldn’t stay where she was, because it was all clashing cacophony sounds and that omnipresent feeling of everything being _wrong_. Because it was, wasn’t it? It was wrong that she was there alone because she couldn’t—

_“You’re lucky you were born now,” Shikako says, taking a sip of tea as she settles down on the grass nearby, the little ornaments hanging from her antlers chiming merrily._

 _Kagome bites back the ugly sitting on her tongue. She’s stuck; used and abandoned in a world that is no longer hers. What is_ lucky _about that? “What do you mean?” she asks instead, keeping her focus on the small light in her hands._

_Keep the flame from going out, Shikako had said when the sun was still high, even while sitting beneath a waterfall._

_It was supposed to help her with her barriers. To give her an incentive to properly cast one and hold it steady._

_She’s already had to relight the little lamp more times than hours have passed._

_“I’m here and can train you.”_

_The witch isn’t joking, as she normally would be. There’s no secret tucked at the corner of her lips, and no mischief in the deep dark of her eyes. There’s a solid set to her form that signals a serious conversation. Kagome almost sighs, instead closes her eyes in a bid to focus on the nascent barrier around her._

_A second later, water crashes down her shoulders, flooding the lamp in her hands._

_“Better,” Shikako tells her, already lighting a new lamp. “You’re dangerous, little bird, but I think you already knew that. Had you been born even half a century earlier, you would have been a threat not only to everyone around you, but also to yourself. It took me a thousand years to be ready to train someone like you, and I’m here because it has been agreed that I am the only one capable of teaching you.”_

_“I know that.” She remembers Miroku trying and failing to teach her barriers in the downtime of their quest. Shikako has only had her trying for a week now and she can already call up a feeble shimmer that briefly redirects the water. Everything comes at a price, she wants to say. Everything comes at a price and what she was forced to pay for this is more than she can afford._

_“I know,” she repeats, softer, moving away from the waterfall to take the new lamp from her teacher. “It doesn’t make it easier.”_

_Shikako gives her a sad smile, one hand beneath her own and the other coming up to hold her wrist. “It rarely does, little bird."_

—the change from inside to outside is a shock. The sun has fallen further and the shadows make the forest air cold against her legs. She has to blink the memory away a bit more to recognize the slubby texture of woven fire rat fur, and again to recognize the feel of arms around her, the weight at the top of her head where he’s pressed his face into her hair.

He’s somehow gotten her onto the roof of the little house, she realizes dimly.

And she’s had another flashback.

She’d been getting better about that, hadn’t she? And since when are they about things other than the darkness and the spiderwebs?

“I’m sorry,” and she’s trying to pour three years’ grief into the words. She shifts enough to tuck herself into the curve of his body. She just—needs to be close. Needs to hide. Needs to do something other than show all her broken bits and the shame bubbles burning up from the cracks. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to.”

“S’not your fault,” his voice cracks, arms around her tightening and oh she does remember this. Remembers the banked strength and the constant awe at how restrained he always was. “You’re home now. You came back.”

She reaches up around his back; if she could disappear into him that might be okay, might help, might fill in all the empty spaces left when everything broke.

But Mama and her gentle sunshine, and Shikako and her unblinking force, and Akari and her summer calm. She’d promised them all, hadn’t she, that she’d do better? Be better? Be something other than a pile of ashes in her ruin?

She’d promised Inuyasha too, even though he hadn’t been there.

“I tried—” no, no, no, the voice in her head goes. He doesn’t need that. Remember how he’d take the smallest things and blame himself? Remember how he’d tear into himself like he’d done something wrong when he had done only the right thing?

“Every three days,” he breathes against her skin. “Tried every three days. Sometimes more.”

There’s something hot and wet sinking into her hair. He’s…crying? So is she, but this is her and she’s always the one who cries. She clings a bit tighter, and tries not to think anything of it when he pulls her more fully into his lap, the hold around her a little too close to crushing. Not that she minds. Couldn’t mind because she should have woken up by now and she hasn’t.

She’s not dreaming.

This is not a dream.

There is still something like panic wrapping around the shame and all the hurt but a brighter sense starts somewhere low. Something forgotten, faded and rusty and feeling like coming back to life. Something like _joy_. Something that flutters when his ear flicks and catches on her hair. That clings to the feel of him, and the warmth of his breath against her skin; that delights in the knowledge that this moment is only theirs and can never be stolen. 

“Every day,” she tells him. “It was right there and I wanted to see you but it wouldn’t let me through. I swear I tried. I didn’t—”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re here now.” It’s muffled, the words pressed into her neck.

It hits, then, heavy and burning. She’s awake and this is real. The well reopened and this is _real_. This is happening, finally. It races through her veins, searing against the shadows that have settled in the last three years.

She’s awake, and alive, and this is real.

He’s real, and oh he loves her too, doesn’t he?

For the first time in three years, she smiles _._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I always swore the only IY fic I would ever write was a ficlet written in ye old LJ days and posted privately for friends.
> 
> Then quarantine happened. And I reread the manga. And was reminded of this very old idea, born of frustration that the Shikon no Tama paradox was never addressed, that Kagome never received any training pre-ending despite having three years unsealed, and the newer realization that that three year separation would lead to some serious trauma. A few other minor annoyances that are potentially controversial will also be appearing here, so now's a good time to state that I do not accept critiques. 
> 
> Tags will be updated as needed.


	2. impossible dreams

The deep rumble that wakes her is a low thing just at the edges of what she can hear. Not really threatening, and almost comforting in the gentle rise and fall of the sound, steady and calm and echoing the sense of deep sleep. She’s about to tell Buyo to move because if the cat knocks out her shoulder again, then…

Her shirt rode up at some point in the night, and the fur against the exposed skin is too much, too coarse for Buyo. And there’s a feeling of being caged in, like someone is holding her. As she drifts more towards waking, she realizes that low sound is behind her, not in front where she can feel the weight of something small pressed against her. It’s also too big to be Buyo, and whatever she’s on is far too hard to be her bed.

And why is she still dressed in her day clothes? Mama is going to—

Waking washes in faster, the light streaming in through the window pointing out that’s actually Shippou curled against her stomach, not Buyo, and the warmth emitting that comforting rumble against her back is—yesterday comes flooding back all at once. The agonizing day trying to stay interested in the lives of people she didn’t really know anymore, and then returning to the shrine weary and cold to the depths of her soul. Walking to the well-house more out of habit than anything because she always checked it first thing after coming back, nearly crying for how much it _hurt_ to be expected to live in peace after everything, without Inu- _him._

And then the wind.

That beautiful breeze and the open sky below. And Mama holding out her bag and her bow, helping her up onto the lip of the well with a smile somewhere between sorrow and joy.

 _Go, and be happy_.

Then she jumped.

And the well finally, _finally_ worked. After three years of trying, blue light swallowed her whole and dropped her up into that perfect sky.

And…

 _Inuyasha_.

She’s home. She’s actually home, waking up with half her heart behind her and the closest thing to a child she’s ever had at her front. She’d doubted where she fit in to this equation last night amid the raw exposure of hope blazing up from cold ashes, and sometime in the night they’d gone and answered it for her.

Carefully she manages to pull Shippou up where she can hold him against her chest. Her little boy; all the worrying she’d done about whether or not he was getting enough food or who was fixing his clothes and was he growing and who was taking care of him—

She hadn’t thought it possible, to love Inuyasha anymore than she already did. She just knows he’s the one who was looking out for the little fox while she was gone. It still hurts, knowing he grew up as much as he apparently did while she was gone, and there’s that cruel little voice whispering that she doesn’t really know him anymore so how could she still love him? She lets that thought strangle itself on its own brutality. The well worked, he was there, is here, and the darkness can’t touch her anymore.

Behind her, that comforting sound has ceased, and the arms around her tighten as Inuyasha folds himself around her. Something cold and faintly wet presses against her skin as he tucks his head into the crook of her neck. His nose, she remembers. Another small detail her dreams never got quite right. Nor the exact grace of his hands, as the arm draped across her moves enough to cage in Shippou too. So delicate, they are, the fingers tapering out to the sharp claws. They don’t look like they could slice through bone and sinew, let alone steel beams. And yet she has seen him do exactly that.

Nothing about him looks like he should be as strong as he is.

“You awake?” she asks, her voice a little scratchy from sleep and tears. Heat rises in her face at the memory of falling apart. She’d been on edge lately, yes, as school ended and Shikako started easing up on the intensity of her training. It had given her too much time to think, too many chances to lose her footing and drown; she’d thrown herself into the work and lessons around the shrine with Jii-chan and Mama to pick up the slack.

Time with her thoughts is a dangerous thing. She’s faced youkai, curses, grisly scenes that she probably never should have seen; none of it was as threatening as the should-have-been innocuous thoughts her mind could conjure up.

Always sweet things, they were. Waking up like this, with Inuyasha beside her in the quiet of sunrise. Falling asleep in his arms, and sometimes thoughts that made her blood run burning in her veins until she woke up alone and remembered what had happened.

Sometimes it would be worse, and instead of Shippou’s little weight in her arms it would be a child that sometimes had puppy ears, sometimes had silver hair and sometimes black, and eyes that could be anywhere from honey gold to deep twilight violet to her own sea storm blue.

Those were always the worst. Those are the ones that sent her to the well, crying herself to exhaustion in the depths, begging for something to give because she couldn’t take much more of that.

It doesn’t matter now, she reminds herself. The well opened, she’s home, she’s exactly where she wants to be. Those dreams can be just that again: sweet dreams of what the future could hold.

They aren’t nightmares anymore.

“Yeah,” he says into her hair. “You’re still here.”

“I am,” the words a little delirious. The spring morning spills in through the slotted window champagne gold, crisp and clean. She can’t remember the last time she felt like this; the effervescent happiness flowing in and around the swirling mess of lazy contentedness and buzzing excitement. She wants to stay put and turn around to wrap herself around him. Or even to go running, or to sit in the treetops the way they used to.

She feels alive for the first time since…

 _Not thinking about it_ , she tells herself, _not now_.

“And so are you,” she whispers, trying her best to lean back even further into his hold. There’s a wobble in her voice when she continues, “I’m not going anywhere like that again. Not without you.”

Somehow she ends up even closer. If he weren’t so careful, she thinks she might be crushed beneath him. She releases Shippou in favor of trying to reciprocate the hold; one hand finds the arm wrapped around her midsection, and the other comes up to thread into his hair, just barely brushing the base of an ear. It flicks a little at the touch, but he doesn’t move away the way he sometimes used to.

“I missed you too,” she whispers back.

—

She could have gladly spent the day like that. But Shippou was never going to sleep the day away, and at some point her skirt had rolled a bit and the fabric was biting into her leg where her weight came down on it.

And she really wanted to change clothes. To ground herself here. She can’t keep looking down and seeing her clothes and feeling fear that she’s about to wake up in Tokyo. She just can’t…

Shippou had been sent off to catch something for food; apparently Inuyasha had taken to teaching the kit how to hunt. Inuyasha himself left, grudgingly, to fetch water and keep an eye on the little boy.

Which left her alone in the house. Both a mercy and a cruelty, that. There’s an ugly thing in her chest scratching up her lungs in protest of the distance between them, that begs to find him and never let him go. And then there’s the shy thing, the same part that purged short sleeves from her wardrobe and wants to do what comes next where no one can see her.

The room he’d carried them to after she fell asleep is the third room she hadn’t seen. It’s another sleeping room, and this one clearly was built with her in mind. The futon is on a slightly raised platform against the wall, not quite like the bed in her childhood room, but clearly taking inspiration from it. An empty chest sits against the wall by the door, and a small cabinet of equally empty drawers is under the barred window.

There’s more than enough room for Shippou’s things to fit in here too. She wonders a bit at that, but then again the last three years have been hard. This room doesn’t look like it’s been used much, if at all. Maybe it was like—there were just some things that were too painful, for her in that far time. Maybe it was the same for him.

She went and got her bag from the entrance after putting up the futon the way Mama taught her to and now the bag sits innocently on the little cabinet. Sunlight filters through the forest, lighting up the dark canvas and all she can think is that it’s been three years since she unpacked anything from this.

She added things to it, of course, and given the weight she suspects Mama stuck some things in it before bringing it out to the well.

She just never took anything out of it, the three years she’s had it.

It started as a…Shikako had called it a coping mechanism, but she just saw it as a thing to steady her nerves and ward off the worst of the panic about the well closing. Everything she’d need, ready and waiting for when she could return: clothes, her books, the arrows too lethal for kyudo, first aid, etc…

Deep breaths. She tries to center herself, tamping down all her frayed edges. “I can do this,” she says, hands clapping loudly in the hush of the room.

The bag opens up to reveal what she’d expected. The spines of her notebooks and the carefully folded clothing she’d spent the last three years making and collecting. Deeper in will be the spare set of fletching equipment for her arrows and the first aid kit Shikako taught her how to make.

And the little bag she’d been carrying when she first approached the well is resting on top. Her ears strain for any sign of Inuyasha and Shippou as she quickly grabs it and pulls the small sketchbook from it, picking a drawer at random and carefully tucking it into the very back before dumping the rest of the little bag into the larger one.

She’ll finish that sketchbook someday. Sooner, maybe, as she sees Mama did indeed add some things to her bag. Including a slim case with some of her pencils. She sets that on top of the book, and quickly sheds the clothes she’s wearing to bury it all, wrapping herself up in one of the long hadagi from the larger bag to hide her right arm as fast as she can.

Which brings the next question.

Which set of clothing?

Akari handled most of her clothing instruction. Mama taught her to sew, but Akari taught her the words and methods the fox had picked up over the centuries. It’s still a little overwhelming; Akari’s information came from a professional standpoint after a few decades spent teaching. And Kagome’s needs were both for an era preceding that information and for life circumstances very different from a wealthy woman in a city.

She has a couple of simple kosode, an apron and a slip, and one or two of her hakama tucked inside the bag. Most are plain, absent any patterns; the majority were left folded away in her dresser at the shrine, all in varying tones of blues and greens. Just not in red; never red, except the one for special occasions at the shrine. And the only chihaya she has ever owned is now five hundred years in the future.

(She may have made some level of peace with Kikyou, but the sting of being mistaken for her hasn’t faded.)

There’s her enchanted silks, the ones Shikako spent the longest time teaching her to make. There’s her favourites of the vintage kimono Akari helped her acquire that are all in in styles that don’t exist yet, the long one-piece hadagi that are her personal preference, her juban, a haori or two, assorted other komono, a rain coat, a couple of yukatas. She’s going to have to do something about some of the missing pieces, at some point; there’s also…

There’s also a kimono she doesn’t recognize.

She dresses fast as she can, linen and basic and meant for working. Then, carefully, she picks up the strange kimono. A piece of paper flutters out of the folds, landing on a crimson obi she has no memory of. They’re both silk, that much is clear. A fine silk for what reveals itself to be what would be old-fashioned if she were still at the dawn of the new millennium, and a rougher one for the obi, the color and texture almost mimicking Inuyasha’s fire rat robes. She squints, leaning in for a closer look at the kimono. Turning it over in her hands, the deep purple fabric catching the light enough to see it’s meant to depict a night sky, honey gold stars flecked about the twilight.

She lets it unfold, voice catching in her throat at the sight before her.

Dogs. Large white dogs, with familiar violet markings across the faces and eyes in red and blue, running through the clouds of a moonless night. There’s no mokomoko, and the markings are too different, but the similarities to Sesshoumaru are hard to ignore.

It’s supposed to be Inuyasha, she realizes, if he had a fully canine form like his brother.

“Oh, Mama,” she breathes. Because it had to be Mama. There’s no one else who would know those details, who had seen the sketches she’d done of Sesshoumaru’s true form and Inuyasha’s youkai form. She folds it back up, placing the garment between layers of less valuable fabrics before picking up the folded paper.

Mama’s careful handwriting unfurls in front of her, apologizing for the borrowing of her sketchbooks, and explaining that the kimono had been Jii-chan’s idea.

 _Something told me you wouldn’t be here for your coming of age ceremony,_ Mama wrote as explanation for why she’d agreed.

 _Oh_.

There’s the tears, the hot sorrow in her chest less like a punch and more like a stab. One day, maybe Mama’s faith will cease to amaze her. She prays that someday she will have that kind of faith herself, because there is no one in either era she has lived who has the same strength and compassion her mother does.

Jii-chan too, in his own quiet way. He could be loud, and boisterous, stubborn and firm. But also so quiet in his acceptance that she was never going to be the same. That whoever he’d thought she’d be before the well was never going to be. And he had been fond of Inuyasha, in his own way. Never outright saying it, but when he’d sat down to teach her calligraphy, it hadn’t slipped her notice that the phrases he chose to start with all involved the kanji for her heart’s name.

It does hurt, knowing she will never—

She blinks through the last of the tears. Something hadn’t felt right there. She takes a deep breath, exhaling with an unwinding of her body as she rewinds her thoughts to play them again, this time listening the way Shikako taught her to.

 _Before all else, listen to your power, little bird_.

That had been the first lesson. Learning to feel her power and how to listen to it. It was maybe not as reliable as the senses of a youkai, but it had yet to fail her.

Sure enough, when she replays the thought, something rings deeply _wrong_ about never seeing her family again. Not in the way that it’s a painful thought that would logically be wrong in most scenarios. But wrong in the sense that it isn’t true, even though she knows it should be.

She’s listening close enough to catch the feel of youki splashing into her senses. Her power flows like water, she’s learned. Vast and deep as any ocean, with currents pushing and pulling all throughout. A steady star sinks in, vibrant and restrained and beckoning with a promise of safety and home. Inuyasha, that one is, which makes the dancing little light further out Shippou.

There’s also a pull from some distant place, singing out for her attention.

Kagome surfaces with a deep breath, letting her senses fade into a lurking awareness of what’s around her. There will be time to figure out what it’s saying later. For all she knows, it could just be pointing out that she has family here, both chosen and of the blood.

She sets her notebooks atop the drawers, finding not only her work books but also the three slim volumes she’d filled up on Shikako’s insistence documenting daily life, and the portfolio of her best sketches on top. Another treat from Mama, because she distinctly remembers keeping that one on her desk where she could add new work when needed. The clothes she finishes arranging into the drawers, putting all of her komono where she can easily reach them when needed, then fishes out a pair of tabi and the zori tucked away at the very bottom, setting aside the amazori for now.

A comb is unearthed from the depths. Nothing fine, but enough to work the tangles out. She pulls her hair back and spins it around, sliding a slender stick in place to hold it up, tucking some of the shorter strands that can’t reach behind her ear. What’s left in the bag is just odds and bits, largely from her work with Shikako and Akari or the random things she’d kept in the handbag.

Her fletching kit and the small sewing kit she leaves on top of her notebooks before gathering up the five little ceramic jars that have rolled together without the fabric of her clothing to protect them. The small knife she tucks way on her body where she can reach it if needed, then sorting out the largely useless trinkets from the future: a bit of lip balm, a couple of hair elastics, and the wallet that contains money and identification information that won’t be valid for several more centuries. Then she folds the empty bag and sticks it in a drawer.

It _clicks_ as it shuts, a finality to the noise.

Carrying the now-precious load of jars in her arms—mentally kicking herself for not stashing some seeds in her bag, she’ll need to see about getting a garden ready as soon as possible—she slides the bedroom door open and then closed with her foot just as the front door slides open to reveal her boys.

Shippou bounces in happily with a bowl full of what looks like skinned rabbit balanced atop his head, grinning so wide his tiny fangs are on fully display. “Look what I caught!”

“Well done,” she tells him, smiling. “Thank you for getting them ready, too.”

“Inuyasha said to not do it inside,” the kit’s nose wrinkles up. “Do you still not like seeing them cleaned?”

She looks up to catch Inuyasha’s gaze now that he’s inside. He looks off balance, somehow, hand dangerously slack on the water bucket he’s holding. Eyes wide, ears tilted forward at attention; not threatened, merely surprised. Why would he be…?

“I don’t mind, actually,” she explains, looking away to move over towards the small corner with counters and shelves. One by one she sets the jars out, only five in total. From Shippou she takes the bowl of rabbit, setting it aside. “I had a teacher who made sure of that.”

Shippou bounces up to perch on her shoulder. “How? You always used to cry when he’d do it at camp.”

“Her method of teaching was to make me do it myself or see to it I didn’t eat,” or strand her in the middle of the woods with no weapons and only a piece of paper giving her a location to aim for. Somehow she doesn’t think explaining it that way would go over very well. Shikako’s methods were not always the safest or the sanest, for all that they did work. “What is there to fix with it? I’ve got some salt, but the rest of this is medicines.”

“Not much,” Inuyasha answers, voice carefully neutral. “We normally eat with Miroku’s family or Kaede-babaa.”

“Sango sent some pickles over after Hisui was born, didn’t she?” Shippou asks, little arms resting on her head as he lifts up to look.

Inuyasha reaches up and over her to one of the shelves, moving a stack of wooden bowls. “Doesn’t look like there’s any left.”

“You didn’t really live here, did you?” Kagome asks, quietly. The empty drawers and chest, the vague feeling of emptiness that permeates the house. The shelves above her have bowls and thin plates, but are mostly bare. And the room where Shippou had been put to bed had precious little beyond a small collection of the kit’s toys and tools in the corner.

There’s a set of thin metal rods on the shelf closest to her. They look like they’re meant for holding meat over a fire, and so she grabs them, making sure they’re clean before beginning to slide bits of rabbit onto them. The back of her mind is already turning over questions about finding herbs for a sauce, or greens for a small salad, half-remembering the foods they’d eat around camp.

“Not really.” He’s so close, nearly speaking into her hair. “Only stayed here on the first of the month. Shippou stays when he’s around, and Kohaku sometimes does when he’s visiting. That’s why there’s a spare room.”

“I understand,” she says. To Shippou, she adds, “do you think you can find some herbs or other wild plants for us?”

The kit nods before shooting off in a streak of orange and green.

“He hasn’t changed that much, has he?”

A clawed hand stops hers from reaching for more rabbit. She feels him against her back before he tucks his head into the curve of her shoulder. There’s no hair to catch the slow breathing across the back of her neck, the sensation jumpstarting her heart into a faster pace. She remembers him being the touchy one before; he’d been reaching for her long before she started returning the attention.

He just wasn’t like this.

“He’s just a runt.”

“He’s also a kitsune,” she says, leaning back into him just a little. Just enough to relax, just enough to feel his other arm come up around her waist. “They age so slow. I can’t imagine they change as rapidly as the rest of us.”

Inuyasha freezes. “Where’d you learn that? And to hunt? And what’s with those jars? That one smells weird.”

“From my teacher. That one contains water from a divine spring.” There’s no point in lying. There’s only so much she can hide, and she doesn’t really want to hide any of it. Not from him. Never from him. “It’s good for treating infection in non-humans.” She points to the others, listing off what they do in succession: “This one is for when someone has been poisoned. This one for fevers. This one is used for treating open wounds. And this one is just plain salt.”

“Any of those for treating humans?” He shifts enough to hook his chin over her shoulder, releasing his hold on her arm.

Once certain he’s not going to stop her from finishing the rabbit, she goes back to work, still reclining against him. This is something she could get used to, maybe. Assuming there isn’t a problem with her training and what she now is.

She hadn’t thought of that. Her training and its direction were what felt natural. At no point did anything feel _off_ about what she was learning, and most of the time the currents in her power were nearly singing they were so pleased. She had been trying so hard to avoid thinking of the well and what its closure meant that she never stopped to consider what Inuyasha’s reaction might be.

Or even what the village might think. Miroku and Sango, or even Kaede. She’d—thinking about what they might see in her training would have meant thinking about the fact that they were all nothing more than ashes devoured by the earth. That they had merely lived a blink of an eye, compared to the gulf between her Tokyo and their village. 

She slides the last of the rabbit on. “No, none of them are, really. The poison treatment and the one for open wounds can be used on humans with power, like Miroku or me. Supposedly the poison treatment can be used on normal humans, but I don’t really want to be the one to test that.”

“Why?”

“There are things worse than death, and if it doesn’t work it would manage them,” she says. “Or why do I have them?”

“That one.”

“It’s what I was taught. Does it bother you if I’m not a miko?”

“What else would ya be?”

“A mage,” she answers. “Though I guess in this time they’d call me a witch.”

There is silence in the house. In the forest beyond too, like it’s all holding a breath in anticipation. She almost wants to take it back, for all that is the truth. There’s just so much she needs to add that she has no idea where to begin with: the battlelines that will be drawn in the coming years, the cold war between human and youkai that still sometimes flares searing hot, the shield that will be built of shrines and temples dedicated to the idea of coexistence, the role Miroku and his legacy will play, or even what Akari had pointed out early in their friendship.

( _You don’t really like humans, do you?_ is what the fox had said, looking at her askance as they sat on the steps of the shrine after school.)

Inuyasha moves enough to hide his face in her shoulder, again, breathing deeply from her skin. “Kagome is still Kagome,” he says. “That won’t change. Can’t say I was expecting this.” 

“But will you still want me?”

“Weren’t a miko when we met.”

“You didn’t want me then.”

“Didn’t take long.” He straightens up, away from being curved against her body, turns her around to face him. She has to hold her hands up nearly to her chin to keep the rabbit remains on them from transferring to either of them. “You couldn’t be evil if ya tried. Never heard of a good witch before, but figures you’d manage it. You never could do normal.”

“Nope,” she smiles, soft at the edges and just for him. “You really don’t mind? Shikako was only following what my power naturally wanted to do. I can still do purifications, but…well, I was never doing them the way others were. I just know _what_ I’m doing now.”

“We’re both still here, ain’t we?” Closer, and closer and his voice has gotten quieter. She could just tip her head up and kiss him, this close. Wants to, and she’s pretty sure he does too. “Was this morning not proof enough?”

The world’s doing that thing again, where it all fades out to just him. There’s a curling warmth around her spine, spreading out across her skin until she feels too exposed, too confined, too needy. Just a little closer, now. So close, and this time no little brother to interrupt—

“I’m back!” Shippou screeches, excited and just outside the door.

Inuyasha steps away quickly, grabbing the rabbit and heading towards the fire. She turns to wash her hands in the small basin next to the counters, heart beating a bit too fast. Everything’s a little too hot, and her lungs feel like they’re trying to relearn how to work.

Shippou came back with enough herbs to make a decent sauce, though a few she sets aside for drying. If he notices the faint blush both she and Inuyasha keep getting when they look at each other while they eat, he isn’t saying anything and that is a mercy.

(Souta had not been so kind. He’d waited until sometime in the second year, when she’d been doing somewhat better, before sidling up beside her while she was weeding the garden and asking just what he’d barged in on that time they returned from vacation to find her and Inuyasha alone together.

She hadn’t answered, but her brother by that point was old enough to put two and two together.)

“You’re staying here, right?” Shippou asks, once he’s eaten his fill. He looks so young and so hopeful, green eyes shining bright as little hands are fisted so tightly the knuckles have turned white. It almost hurts to look at; she’s never really thought of what her absence might do to him. Oh she’s worried about whether or not he was getting food, or protection, or had a warm place to sleep when winter wandered over the world. But she’s never—

—tried really, because there’s only so much the heart can take and hers had been breaking under the strain. So she did her best to not think of how much he may have been missing her. Somehow her mind had kept her from the worst of that, the worst of thinking that the long dark may have been as painful for others as it was for her.

It had been killing her; she couldn’t apply that to Shippou. She just couldn’t. 

“Yeah, kid, she is,” Inuyasha answers. He’s looking right at her, the blush a little fainter than it has been. But his ears are low and to the side. “If she wants to…”

“I do,” she quickly says. She can feel her skin turning pinker for it. That must sound desperate. Which she is. She’s had three years of thinking she would never get this chance. Desperate is only the beginning, the sheer want for both the man across from her and the new promises of tomorrow searing so hot it might be burned into her bones.

Shippou blinks, looking between the two of them. She can see him from the corner of her eye, that shine in his expression and the smile struggling to escape at the corner of his mouth. The kit is looking entirely too excited now. “Are you two going to be like Sango and Miroku now?”

“Like…” she trails off, just as Inuyasha blushes near as red as the fire rat. It takes a moment to remember that Sango and Miroku are _married_. With children. He’s asking—her own blush burns fierce. “Oh, like that. I-I’d like to.”

“Bedtime, runt,” Inuyasha says suddenly, hopping up to stand. Too fast, and still blushing. “Kagome, we gotta talk.”

“It’s only lunchtime,” Shippou whines. She recognizes that look. Souta got it all the time when he was insulted, that pinched brow and the sour pull at the mouth.

“Why don’t you go play with some of the other children?” It’s the first thing she can think of. Inuyasha isn’t going to let this go, and really they do need to talk about this. Preferably without an audience. “Or if you don’t mind, could you check in with Kaede and Sango to see if they need me for anything?”

He still looks insulted. It’s cuter when he does it than when it was her brother, but he grumbles an assent and bounces off on his way. As he leaves, one of Inuyasha’s ears flicks the way it does before—there it is, the leaning forward to pay close attention.

“Do we need to be worried about any pranks?”

If anything, Inuyasha’s blush intensifies even further. “No, he’s just muttering about giving us time alone and how nothing’s changed.”

“He did do that a lot,” she says. “It usually ended in him getting attacked by a random youkai, didn’t it?”

“Only random youkai he’d meet ‘round here is my brother.” There’s no hostility in his voice when he says _brother_. She’d noticed, of course, that both he and Sesshoumaru never spoke of each other as anything less than family, even when they were at their most violent.

Rin living here must mean Sesshoumaru visits more often. Does that mean the brothers are actually speaking to each other? Have had proper conversations with each other?

Just how much did she miss?

“Oi, quit it,” Inuyasha says. He holds a hand out to help her stand as the fire _snap-hisses_ , dying a little more. “What’s with the frown?”

“Just realizing how much has changed.” She takes a deep breath before taking her own step near him. The light coming in from the forest dances off his hair, turning it every shade from silver to brightest white, to a subtle blue near the shadows.

And that gentle light sweeps along the beads around his neck, shining magatama and the little beads between looking near violet where the light glances off them. 

Those beads; she really should see about removing them, now. She reaches up to trace one of the magatama. They’ll need to talk about it at some point, and she’ll need to talk to Kaede to find out the exact spell…just not right now. Right now it’s the conversation they skirted around three years ago, and the one they can’t really put off any longer.

“Not that much has changed. Sesshoumaru’s still an asshole, Shippou’s still a runt,” he sighs, eyes closing. “Okay, yeah, the humans have changed a lot. Not really Kaede-babaa, but the others.”

“You’ve changed.”

“You haven’t?” he scoffs, but there’s nothing harsh in it.

She nods, conceding the point. “We’ve both changed, but we both want this, right? I want to be with you. That’s all I’ve wanted for the last four years. I spent every day at the well praying to see you again. That’s what I was doing when the well reopened.”

“You really mean that,” he breathes, sounding almost…reverent? She doesn’t have the time to question it; by the time she’s formed a question he’s brushing back a stray lock of hair and the feel of claws against her skin sends a shiver down her spine. “They’ll call you—doesn’t matter, does it. Not a miko. They’ll call you worse than a witch.”

“Oh you mean youkai’s whore, youkai’s bitch, more ways of saying slut than I knew were possible,” she lists them off, all by memory. Akari had once asked whether or not she’d encountered anything like that, when asking further questions about her attitudes towards humans. “Dark miko, witch—which I guess isn’t really an insult anymore—and I’ve been called a youkai myself more than a few times.”

His forehead meets hers as he sighs, a growl buried beneath it. “Ya shouldn’a heard any of that. You saw what they did to Shiori’s ma, and Jinenji’s too. What if the villagers here turn on you?”

“Us,” she corrects gently. “And they may. If they do, we leave. So long as we’re together, I don’t care.”

This, this she remembers. The intensity of meeting him gaze for gaze, of the near-hypnotic pull. The hand that had been at her hair goes to her hand, pulling her somehow closer still. “You’re okay with that? With everything?”

“What part of this are you asking about?” she says. _Use your words, Kagome-chan_ , her mother’s voice rings out in her head. “The together part? Because I don’t know how many more ways to say that I want you and that I don’t want a world without you. Or is it the _like Miroku and Sango_ part?”

“That one.”

“Which part of it?”

“The part— _fuck_.”

Four years she’s dreamt of this. Four years of dreams and fantasies; none of it quite right. She won’t remember forgetting to breathe, or the cold of his nose against her skin when she turns her head just so. What she will remember is the feel of claws biting at her hip, and the low growl she feels more than she hears. Will remember the feel of his body so close it’s hard to tell where she ends and he begins.

It’s intense, far more intense than she’d thought her first kiss would be, but the four years of waiting for it must have had an effect. Cumulative, slowly building up like water against a dam, just waiting for release. She will never remember the first brush of fang against her lip, but she does remember the second time when it’s less an accident and more an intentional bite.

The kiss is just deepening, just enough her thoughts are beginning to turn gossamer when he backs away with a near-vicious snarl. “Fucking monk, you’ve gotta be shitting me.”

“How close?” she asks, hiding her now-burning face against his chest.

“Close enough,” he says, still with a low growl. “Sounds like they’re all there. _Shit_.”

“Children too? Is Shippou with them?”

“Yeah.”

She sighs. “We were going to have to face them sometime. Might as well do it now.”

It’s not fair, she thinks a little traitorously. She wants to see them, really, she does. She wants to get to know her friends’ children. She wants to become a part of their lives again. Just. _Four years_. Two interruptions. Once her brother and another Shippou, and when they finally, _finally_ got anywhere near the place her dreams kept going…

She sighs, again, and counts this as half an interruption.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is so much I keep having to edit out because Kagome doesn't know it/has the wrong info about it and that section with the surprise kimono is so far the biggest of them. T_T


	3. raindrops through the clear

They come bearing gifts.

It’s hard to stay upset when they’re so happy and excited. Most of them, at least. Kagome doesn’t miss the dirty looks the twin Inuyasha has to quietly remind her is Natsumi keeps sending her. For a two-year-old, there’s rather a lot of attitude in it.

She watches them amble down the dappled path, Shippou keeping pace with the twins as the adults and Rin, of all people, follow. Miroku is carrying a basin filled with what looks like vegetables and some jars, while Sango has the baby on her back and a basket of what looks like fabric in her hands. Even Rin is carrying a basket, though whatever is inside is covered by a patchwork blanket tucked in over it.

_Oh_ , she thinks, remembering her mother making pickles for their new neighbors when she was twelve. It’s just the same. A welcome to a new home. She leans up against Inuyasha, just a little, and smiles when she feels his arm hook around her waist in return.

Miroku is smiling just a little too smugly as he approaches. She’s likely the only one who can hear Inuyasha’s low growl at the sight of it and she has to swallow the giggles before they can escape. Of course Miroku is going to tease, of course. What else would he do? It takes her back to their simpler days, when she’d hear the same growl and see the same smug look. “Stop that,” she tells him, reaching up to place a hand at his back. “They gave us almost an entire day.”

“Keh,” is all she gets in return, the sound more like a bark than she remembers it being.

“Pardon the intrusion,” Miroku calls out once they’re all close enough, “but the vegetables wouldn’t hold forever.”

Rin dashes ahead, basket held out. Kagome has to untangle herself from Inuyasha enough to take it from the girl. It’s a reluctant thing, and she stays where he can keep his hand on her hip and where the weight of his sleeve rests against her body. “Lady Kaede wished to give these to Lady Kagome last night,” the girl says, barely winded. “Lady Kagome was expected for dinner.”

“Kid, you don’t hav’ta speak like that here.” Inuyasha takes a deep breath in, releasing it slowly. Anger management, Kagome notes. When did he learn that? “That conceited prick ain’t here.”

Rin just makes a face, sticking her tongue out at him.

In the background, there’s a startled shriek. The panic hits like a whiteout, for all that it lasts only a moment. That was Shippou, but there’s no danger. No danger. Just a troublesome pair of twins, one of whom has landed on his tail with a victorious grin.

“Oi, you okay?” Inuyasha turns her towards him, concern in his eyes. “Breathe, Kagome.”

She takes a deep breath. It’s shakier than she’d like. The light’s gone weird, and she can feel the ghostly cobwebs in her mind. Slowly she loosens her hold on the basket; her knuckles have gone white and the pain tells her the basket has likely cut into her fingers. Inuyasha takes it from her, and she flips a hand over to see the red indent left behind. Her hand is shaking.

No blood. That’s…progress.

Blindly she reaches up beneath her right sleeve to rest her hand across the lines there. She’s dimly aware of Rin rescuing Shippou, calmly telling the littler girl to be nicer to him.

Inuyasha reaches for her sleeve, and a different kind of panic sweeps through. Not as vicious, not as threatening, just a normal kind of fear, because this is Inuyasha and he always tends to blame himself for things.

“I’m fine,” she says, voice low and eyes looking down. “It just took me by surprise.”

She’d been doing so much better about this. About loud noises and that sudden high shriek hat was different this time? Because it was Shippou, and that was where so many of her nightmares went? He’d been loud already today, but not in pain.

How was it Jii-chan put it? Three steps forward, two steps back? He’d told her how to handle this. Three things for each sense, was it?

She takes a deep breath, and it’s a little steadier.

She can see light glinting glitter-gold off the rings of Miroku’s shakujo. There’s the emerald green of the canopy where sunlight filters in. And the fire rat: crimson vibrant and with a texture almost like the dupioni of that surprise obi tucked into the drawers. 

Sound: songbirds, wind through trees, and Rin’s bubbly-brook voice.

Feel: the uneven texture of the fire rat, the heat of Inuyasha’s body, the sagging weight where the stick in her hair has started to come loose.

Taste is always the hardest. The crisp air is clean and sweet on her tongue, and there’s a bitter like bile at the back of it. There’s no third thing she can taste, but her heart has slowed back down to normal and she can breathe again. That’s all that matters. 

“Kagome?” Sango comes up, balancing her basket on her hip. “Inuyasha, can I borrow her for a moment? I’ll help get these things put away.”

“Anything I can help with?”

“Just help keep an eye on the children, if you could,” she tells him, passing her basket to Kagome and reaching back to where Hisui is strapped against her. Sango looks over at where Rin is trying to corral both twins. “They’re a little energetic today.”

Inuyasha sighs, but shifts to take the baby with one arm in a practiced move that’s by far the most surprising thing yet. It’s like it’s normal, Kagome realizes.

(It probably is, is the thought that follows. Babies are a lot of work even in the future, and twins even more because two at once. He’s probably done this hundreds of times to help them out. That maybe shouldn’t make her want to kiss him. Maybe.)

Once the baby is secured, Sango takes Rin’s basket from his other arm, and steps up to usher Kagome towards the house, calling for Miroku to bring the basin for them.

“I’m so sorry,” Sango says, voice low once they’re inside. “I didn’t think about the girls and their games. Are you okay?”

The door slides open once more to reveal Miroku, who takes one look at Sango and sets the basin down with a nod to them both before disappearing again.

“Yeah, I am,” she says. _Use your words_ , Mama’s voice reminds her. “No one was there, in the future, so I didn’t have to deal with that. Things still bothered me, but…”

She trails off. How to say...all of it. This kind of thing doesn’t come with a guidebook, and she’s ever mindful of the fact that Inuyasha is just outside and is undoubtedly more focused on listening to their conversation than he is on the children. She’s already said enough that would likely hurt him.

_No one was there_.

She’d been totally alone in a world full of people she should have belonged to. There wasn’t anyone she could really talk to, either because she’d tried her level best to keep the worst of her experiences from her family, or because she couldn’t very well say _I’m a time traveler and all those times I was sick I was really five hundred years in the past and now I can’t get back_.

“There were other things,” she settles on, reminding herself to put down the basket before she hurts herself or breaks it. “It doesn’t matter now.”

Sango puts her own basket down and is over to her in a blink, reaching out to hold her shoulders, bending down put them at eye level with each other. “It does matter, Kagome. We all had to deal with this. We’re still dealing with it. I still get tense when there’s a gust of wind, and Miroku doesn’t like the sound of buzzing insects. You’re not alone.”

Once upon a time, Sango had thrown herself at Kagome and broken down into the kind of heaving sobs that only pure relief can bring. Repeating that with roles reversed had not been something planned, but…

_You’re not alone_.

Three years she’s wished for that to be true, and it finally is.

She’s not alone anymore. She hadn’t really realized just how alone she’d been. How much it really meant to be surrounded by people who knew her nightmares as well as she did simply because they’d lived through them too. How much it means to be with the people who were always there, always at the end of the battle, always there to help patch each other up. Who were there for the good times, as well as the bad.

How much it means to actually, finally have people she can talk to without having to edit herself.

Sango takes it all in stride. Kagome can feel her hand carding through her hair, and Sango is humming softly. The awkwardness that used to tinge her actions every time things got emotional is absent, a steady patience in its place.

“I’m a little surprised Inuyasha didn’t barge in,” Sango says when the worst of the tears have passed. Her tone is soft and light, the kind of gentle Mama would do when the bad times came calling and she was trying to help.

“So am I,” Kagome manages. A lock of hair falls loose, and she can see where the stick that had been holding it back has fallen to the floor.

Sango rubs a hand across her back as she gets her breathing back under control, and pulls a cloth from the basket of linens. Standing up, she takes it over to where the clean water is kept, and returns to kneel down with the moistened cloth held out. “C’mon, let’s get you cleaned up.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Don’t be,” Sango’s voice is firm. “We all have moments where it gets to be too much. We’re only people.”

They’re quiet just for a bit, both lost in thought. Outside, one of the girls laughs high and clear, the innocence of it chasing off some of the shadows. “Have you told them anything about what happened?”

Sango shakes her head. “Not really. We’ve slowly been working some details in, but they’re both so young. Neither of us wants them to know, if that makes sense.”

“It does.” It’s the same reason she kept so much from her brother, she thinks. He didn’t need to know, didn’t need that to tarnish his innocence the way it had hers. She’d gone into the quest a child, but came out of it something broken. He didn’t need that, and the one thing she will be eternally grateful for is that that shining world in the future means he should never experience anything like it.

A scraping sound draws her attention. Sango is pulling the basin Miroku carried in towards her. “If you think you’re ready, we do need to get these things put away.” 

“What is all of this?” she asks, setting the cloth to the side. She reaches back to fix her hair. The stick slides back into place and she sighs in relief at having everything secure again. Little things to make her feel safe, and she misses her silks with a keening.

There’s no reason to have the armor on here, she reminds herself.

This is only life.

“That basket came from Kaede. I think she was expecting you last night for dinner,” Sango explains. “That one is from me. I didn’t realize you’d have clothes, so there’s a spare of mine and some fabrics for sewing. The basin is more of a group thing. Takenosuke brought the basin and I think some of his sake. Some of the village women brought food, and I think the blacksmith added some cooking tools. He was grumbling something about Inuyasha not accepting payment for fixing his workshop roof this last winter.”

“Oh,” is all she manages. “Do-I’m not sure I should accept some of this.”

They’re likely assuming she intends to become the new village miko. It’s just the same as when she first arrived, and they put her up on a pedestal as Kikyou’s reincarnation. Still just as uncomfortable now as it was then. This isn’t that different, is it?

Sango blinks at her. “They did the same thing for us. Well, more but it was immediately after Naraku and we were the most visible ones after. Sesshoumaru left before the dust settled. Inuyasha and Shippou were…” she goes quiet for a moment. “Inuyasha and Shippou weren’t really around, those first few months. I mean, they were, but not _in_ the village just around—and you were gone.”

That tastes bitter on the tongue. The reminder that…

Kagome takes a deep, deep breath, closing her eyes and breathing out through her nose. Just the way she was taught to, when facing something she doesn’t want to admit to.

And she doesn’t want to admit it. The somewhat-belated jealousy that Sango and Miroku got the fairytale happy ending at the end of everything and all the rest of them got was…

…a tragedy.

They defeated the great evil and immediately lost each other, lost whatever future they may have been hoping for, whatever joy and relief that should have followed that victory. Kagome remembers the sudden cold seeping up from the bottom of the well, freezing her all the way to the bone realizing that Inuyasha was gone and the portal was closed.

She’d been so happy, so safe, in his arms and watching the Shikon no Tama finally vanish.

The shock of being stranded immediately after that had been a violent one. So violent that three years later she’s still bleeding.

It’s better now, she reminds herself. She’s home and they’re together and it’s three years late but they’ve got their happy ending now. It may be a little bruised, but it’s theirs.

Still stings, though.

What must this have been like for Inuyasha, who was here for their marriage and the births of their children? Actually here, instead of learning about it from faded, damaged texts unearthed from the depths of Jii-chan’s storehouse. Did he dream of what they could have had, had the well not locked her away from him?

Did he dream the same things she did? Of happiness and light and children who may yet exist but the promise of whom was all but annihilated by the well’s closure?

(Did he even want—that’s part of the conversation they still haven’t finished, isn’t it?)

“Food first,” she says. “I’m not really used to storing fresh things, so if you don’t mind helping we could start there.”

—

He’s frowning too much. It’s a delicate art perfected over the last three years, watching the children while also keeping an eye on their resident hanyou is. And what Miroku decides on this day, after Hisui is settled in his own arms, is that Inuyasha is frowning far too much for a man who has just had the love of his life returned to him.

Rin is excellent with the girls, leading them in a complicated game he’s fairly certain she’s come up with on the spot, involving sticks and stones and that keeps them far away from Shippou, who has retreated to perch on Inuyasha’s shoulder, he’s noticed, and the little boy is being far less subtle about looking worried back at the house.

Ah, so that’s what it is. He glances up to see Inuyasha’s ears positioned just so. His attention is just as evenly split as Miroku’s is. Albeit Inuyasha’s appears to be between the children and the women inside the house.

“I don’t think she’s going to disappear,” he says, sidling over to them. “They’re just making the house a home. You’re not a bachelor anymore.”

Not like he was really a bachelor to begin with. Miroku had once mistaken them for married himself, before he learned the truth. Sango herself made the same assumption. It really was quite easy to do, especially once things had settled a bit and the relationship had clearly become a _relationship_. And by the end…well.

It’s been a long three years, and there’s reasons beyond his ancestry that kept any would-be matchmakers away from the hanyou.

“It’s not that,” Inuyasha mutters. “She was upset earlier.”

Ah, _that_.

“So I did see that,” Miroku says. And sighs. Kagome had been such a bright thing, so full of light and hope. He’d been hoping that if any of them had escaped the nightmares, it might be her. “Is she alright?”

“Sounds like it. Sango’s teaching her how to store food.”

“They’ll be a while,” Miroku says. “Sango has been worried about making sure Kagome knows how to survive here without access to the world beyond the well.”

“She’ll be fine,” almost defensive, that. “She’s got us.”

It takes a moment, to realize Inuyasha means himself and Shippou. That does make this a little easier. “Yes, I suppose she does. There are still some things she will need help with, most likely. There’s a difference between living in the wilds and living in a home. Especially when little ones come along.”

“What’re ya tryin’ to say, monk?”

Miroku does his best to look innocent. “Nothing, nothing. I had assumed that you had taken her for a wife, is all. Children usually follow.”

Inuyasha won’t look at him, a blush coming up across his cheeks. There’s a rustle in his hair as Shippou dives beneath the silver to poke his head out on this side, green eyes peering out from amid the snowy pale. The kit stays quiet, though. Unusual, that. Just…judging.

“I did not mean to offend,” Miroku offers.

“Ya didn’t.”

“Good.” He sighs. This was never going to be easy, was it? “I do need to know, however, what your intentions are. You likely know better than I the state of the village. The news that she spent last night with you hasn’t yet reached the far side, but it will.”

“She’s staying here!” Shippou insists, pulling himself fully out of the shroud of Inuyasha’s hair. “Kagome said so herself!”

“Did she now?”

Inuyasha just gives him a look, narrowed eyes and slightly lowered ears. Not a full threat, but enough to show irritation. Hisui shifts a little. For a moment he’s afraid they’ve woken the babe. There’s no cry, and the babe’s breathing stays steady; how they got so lucky to have such a placid son after the chaos of the girls he will never understand.

“We are,” the hanyou starts slowly. He reaches up to adjust Shippou’s position on his shoulder and tilts his ears back towards the house again. “Like you and Sango. Just not as fast.”

It clicks, then. “Did we interrupt something?”

“Drop it, monk.”

_Oh_.

“My apologies,” he offers. “Sincerely.”

An entire night and almost an entire day. He’d bit his tongue three years ago to keep from questioning when he’d been curious as to why Inuyasha had yet to claim the clearly very willing Kagome. He’s still curious, but perhaps his view is skewed. He knows that youkai, and even hanyou, often have a different concept of time. He’s also aware that Kagome’s homeland, based on what she’d told him, does not encourage marrying as young as he and Sango did, and outright frowns on having children at the ages that they did.

But…

He really had been trying to give them as much time as possible.

“I am unfamiliar with marriage customs both among youkai and her homeland,” he says, carefully. “If there is anything you need help with, it would be my honour to assist.”

He gets an ear flick for that, fast and sharp. Annoyed. “Hell if I know anything about youkai customs,” Inuyasha grumbles. “Don’t matter. We are what we are.”

“Quite right,” Miroku says, adjusting the baby in his arms. Rin has the girls fully occupied now. Natsumi especially, but she’s been steadily cultivating a strong competitive streak from the day she greeted the world. Ayaka seems content for now to follow Rin’s lead. “If anyone questions it, just send them to me. I took the liberty of recording the two of you as husband and wife already.”

“Why?” Shippou asks.

Miroku blinks. He had been expecting a question about it, but not from the boy. Inuyasha is clearly paying attention, for all that he seems to be focused on the girls and their game. He looks pensive, their hanyou does.

And so he explains: Shortly before recording his own marriage in the records of his fledgling temple, he’d recorded a second marriage backdated to just before the battle with Naraku. It had been done in a fit of shock and grieving, though that part he doesn’t reveal. The need to have some record that Kagome had existed is all he explains, that she and Inuyasha had been the heart and soul of that long battle and the weary victory at the end of it all.

That they had lived, and loved.

Just in case.

“That wasn’t-,” Inuyasha takes a deep breath. “Ya didn’t have t’do that.”

“Yes, I did.”

This is the part he hasn’t been able to talk about, yet. Three long, long years. Three years of watching himself and Sango grow and change, watching their children come into the world and blossom into the beautiful souls they are. And three years of watching Inuyasha slowly fade as the seasons turned. Of watching Shippou emotionally pull away more and more, even as he stayed physically present.

They’d already lost Kagome, he and Sango had, and they were slowly losing the two of them as time went on.

Sango had managed a steady faith, an unshakeable knowledge that someday Kagome would come back. It was something to be admired; that hard set to her jaw and the spark in her eye whenever someone implied Kagome was gone forever. She’d just _known_ that she was right. She never could explain it with words, and he had prayed fervently for that same knowledge.

Because his own faith had not been so solid.

It had been, that first year. But then one year rolled into two, and then three, and it crumbled a little more each time the cherry blossoms bloomed and faded. It crumbled even more as he noticed Tessaiga slowly begin to falter.

If Kagome were coming back, after all, wouldn’t there still be a need for the fang?

The one thing he did have faith in, was this: Kagome was stranded five hundred years in the future. As a full-blooded kitsune, Shippou could survive that easily so long as he remained physically safe through these dangerous early centuries. As a hanyou, Inuyasha’s survival was less certain.

That he could keep faith in; that at least one of them would find her in that distant day. That she would return to them when they are all alive and hale…that he struggled with.

He needs access to the pocket in his sleeve. The weight, combined with Hisui’s, is getting to be far too much. It had been a whim to grab the now-substantial bag from where he’d hidden it in the temple. A part of him had been expecting to explain on his deathbed to Shippou what it was and what it was for.

“Has she mentioned anything of what these last few years have been like for her?” he asks instead. “She still has the bow from Mt. Azusa, I saw.”

“She’s trained, if that’s what you’re askin’,” Inuyasha says, typical gruffness in his voice. It changes a beat later when he sighs. “She’s not a miko, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re not gonna find it.”

Even Shippou looks surprised by that. “What’d you mean she’s not a miko?”

“Didn’t train as one,” he explains. “We were still talkin’ when you lot turned up.”

“I figured she was trained,” Miroku says. “She isn’t bleeding purification aura everywhere the way she used to.”

He hadn’t the time to realize she had a handle on her aura yesterday, but today it stands out. He can feel it, a banked power to his back, vaguely like the sense of walking along the seaside and feeling the depth the tides whisper of. He can tell it’s there, but it’s being held back by some greater force.

She isn’t sealed anymore, that much he can tell. That much he _knows_. Inuyasha had told him once of the battle with Sesshoumaru against Magatsuhi, so he knows the seal that held her power out of reach is long gone. The only answer is that she’s trained and was taught by someone who had an interest in helping her not accidentally purify the two youkai beside him. Her control is impressive, if she’s really as powerful as he thinks she is.

“She can still do it, can’t she?” Shippou asks.

“Says she can.”

Miroku casts a look at the girls. They’ve moved on from whatever game Rin had set them to, and instead are listening as the older girl regales them with some kind of story. Probably about Sesshoumaru; if left to her own devices, Rin would have everyone believing he was a paragon of virtue.

And about Kagome; he closes his eyes to focus inward, then outward, pushing his own senses out to feel the flowing power all around them. It isn’t easy with Inuyasha right beside him. The hanyou’s aura is almost absurdly powerful, and resisting the pull to bend around it like the wild magics of the forest takes rather more patience than he’d like to give. He manages it, only just. Kagome is a subtle thing, for all that what whisper of her there is speaks of fathomless depths. Despite that depth, there is no darkness he can tell. She seems to be as light and bright as always, merely matured a bit.

“Of that, I have no doubt,” he decides. Her power has always been odd. He’d chalked it up to her having been under seal, as way of explaining why he had been unable to teach her anything. But if her power is instead of a different nature, that would explain it as well. “Miko is merely a job, Shippou, just as monk is. Someone may be able to do the job, but that doesn’t mean they must do it.”

There is, however, precious little a woman of her power could be, if she is refusing the title of miko. All of them could cause problems, should the village winds change to be less favorable towards Inuyasha. He looks down at his son, so peaceful and calm. There’s a terrible line of thought. They only just got everyone back.

“I trust she’s aware of what may happen—”

“She knows,” Inuyasha cuts him off. “That we did get to.”

“Excellent.” Miroku smiles, trying to lighten the conversation before it gets any heavier. “For what it’s worth, there isn’t much need for a second miko in this village. Lady Kaede is still around, and I’m here now. Between Rin assisting with healing and the children, we’ll have no shortage of people who can handle threats.”

“You say that like we’re gonna be leaving.”

He doesn’t deign to answer that. In the quiet of the nights they were sure they were alone, save the sleeping children, he and Sango had talked about that. The sense that the only thing keeping Inuyasha here was the well and his long vigil. That Inuyasha was the only thing keeping Shippou here. Now that Kagome is back…

“Are the women still working?” he asks instead.

“Sounds like,” Inuyasha tilts his head back, ears swiveling to try and turn that direction. “Something about whatever the old woman sent.”

He motions for Inuyasha to take Hisui from him. Shippou jumps down from the hanyou’s shoulder, dashing off towards the house, apparently deciding that helping decode the elder miko’s gifts was better than listening to them. Oh well. He’s fairly certain Inuyasha will prefer this be just between them. Once the baby is settled again, Miroku takes a deep breath and reaches into his robes. The bag he withdraws is heavy, clinking slightly as it moves. “Here, this is yours.”

“Smells like coins.”

“Because it is.”

“For…?”

Miroku reaches out to take his son again once he manages to get Inuyasha to take the bag. It takes longer than it ought to; their hanyou is nothing if not stubborn. “During our quest for the Shikon no Tama, and all of the exterminations you’ve worked on since, you never took your share of the payment. During the quest I had pooled yours and Kagome’s together, and after I just kept adding your pay to it.”

“Don’t need it.” He’s gone a little pink, ears pressed down.

Miroku sighs, heavily. The truth of it is that what’s in that bag isn’t even the full four years’ worth of wages. Most of the extermination pay was done in goods rather than coin, and a few fabrics have been too nice or too practical to just liquidate like the rest of them. Some came home with him for Sango or their girls, but a handful were set aside for a purpose they never spoke of. He knows Inuyasha never questioned it after the twins were born, and wonders if his most stubborn friend will recognize any of them when he sees them with Kagome.

“It's not just you anymore, Inuyasha,” he says, gently. After four years of socialization, one would think Inuyasha would have learned by now what it means to be part of a family. A functional one with significantly less attempted murder, that is. “You may not, but she is not you. And any child that may come will be mostly human. If nothing else, save it for them. You could even store it to go to her family in the future, if you really don’t want it.”

Inuyasha says nothing to that, but doesn’t try to return the bag. Instead he looks back at the girls, ears tilted ever so slightly towards the house.

It’s not much, but it’s good enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Listen, I love the idea of Rin using hyper formal speech for no other reason than she knows it annoys the crap out of Inuyasha. Also, writing formal speech when the speaker is 11? Not fun. 
> 
> Also had to double check which arm was injured during the final battle and I'm still not confident. It's shown to be her right arm, but the blood appears to be on Inuyasha's right hand, which given the action shown is a little weird. 
> 
> As for the whole honorifics vs English, I'm trying to keep things easy to read. So Jii-chan will always be Jii-chan because Grandpa just doesn't quite feel right for him, but he's probably the only one I will address like this. There's a few times when the use of honorifics will come up but overall I'm probably just going to go with whatever flows better in context or is needed to distinguish a character from another who may have a similar or same name.
> 
> And yes, the Tessaiga issue will be addressed later on. That's actually a set of chapters I'm really looking forward to, because it's the first proper introduction of the main drama.


	4. it's only life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Notes: to Sara, who kept me sane while I was trying to write Inu's POV.

She’s tried her best to ignore how surprised her friend is every time she shows she knows what she’s doing. To distract, she’s told stories of learning to sew with her mother, or the gardening work she did at the shrine and at Shikako’s temple.

Somehow she manages to avoid mentioning that Shikako is a youkai. It isn’t a deliberate omission; she just didn’t think of it. That Shikako isn’t human was never a major issue for her. Akari too. That they were youkai was a distant second to who they were as people.

And she is so, so used to not mentioning to anyone that youkai exist.

Around the time they decide to begin dinner preparations is about when the temperature dropped enough she had to go get one of her haori and it’s in the quiet of the bedroom that she realizes she’s been doing it. There’s so much going on, between all the information coming her way and trying to keep up and remember what she can and cannot say yet.

So when Sango makes an offhanded comment about sending Inuyasha and Shippou to go fishing, Kagome takes the initiative and offers to go herself. There’s more surprise at that, but it doesn’t really register with her. It’s just too much, too loud, too fast. She’d thought the city was bad, but it’s more than that.

It’s realizing how out of sync she is with them. This is her family, as much as Mama and Jii-chan and Souta are. But then, she never told them the full truth of what her time in the past was like.

(She’s never told anyone what those three days in the dark were like.)

It’s Sango bustling about, and Shippou alternating between perching on her shoulder and sitting by the fire. It’s hearing the children laughing and playing outside. It’s knowing Miroku and Inuyasha are nearby and she never wants to be separate from him again, not again—

It’s just more people nearby than she’s used to, anymore.

The city was cramped, yes, but she kept herself apart as best she could. She’d had a small social circle during the quest; larger on this side of the well and she was quite fine with that. After—after the end, she’d found the isolation of the other side distressing for the first year or so. But after that she’d grown used to how quiet it was.

In school she stayed largely to herself, or near Akari. She had archery club, and that was kept fairly professional; none of the other girls in the club were overly loud, the lot of them trending more studious and serious and always a bit distant. And then there was the shrine, where she stayed in the back near the house, tending to the duties that didn’t involve the public. And then Shikako’s temple, where the only souls around were usually herself, the old witch, and Akari.

Maybe it was just the earlier shock. Hopes, actually. Life in the village will likely require her to interact with people, she knows that. But then again, this little house is tucked away in the forbidden woods. Maybe she doesn’t need to—

She reaches up to remove the stick from her hair, running her hands through the now-loosened strands as she leans against the back of the house. The villagers are the villagers; they never seemed overly hostile to her obvious attachment to Inuyasha. But a mage married to a hanyou and the kitsune child who lives with them? Would they accept that? Will they accept that she knows next to nothing about how to be a miko in this time but knows how to treat ten different common youkai diseases and how to counter most toxins that affect youkai by heart? Or that she has the rest of such information written out in neat lines of her notebooks?

Fish, right. She was going after fish.

This isn’t any different than Shikako’s survival trails, she tells herself, when her memory of the forest falters. She thinks to where the house is, where the well and the Goshinboku stand, and then thinks of the village and the river. In her time the river has vanished beneath the concrete, but here it runs across the northeastern edge of the village. The well is almost due east, the tree to the north, and the house to the west.

She pushes off from the house and heads in the direction she’s guessing.

On the way she snaps a stick free from a tree, drawing out her knife to start whittling the end into a sharp point, just as she was taught to—

_“Like this,” the fox says, painted claws flashing bronze in the sunlight. It’s easy to forget what Akari is, sometimes, after months in the city, always seeing her with a glamour pulled tight around her to keep her appearing no different than a human. But claws out, slit-pupil eyes, and the two tails swishing behind her as she moves; it’s a wonder she can even pass for human. “A normal arrow isn’t good for this. You want something stronger and heavier that the fish will have a harder time breaking off.”_

_“Won’t it just be able to slip a spear?” Kagome asks, looking at how smooth the point Akari is carving is._

_The fox grins, glinting fangs and all. Just a few months ago that same expression would have been closed lipped, fangs hidden from sight. Humans get nervous when reminded predators exist, Shikako had explained. There aren’t quite words to describe how much it means that Akari trusts her enough to let down her walls like this._

_“That’s why you add a barb. Just like a fishing hook,” she says, displaying the careful cut needed to create the back-facing point. “You’ll also need a line.”_

_“I thought that ‘always have twine’ thing was a joke.”_

_“Nope! Although you’ll want something a little stronger than plain twine.” Akari’s excitement is a little contagious; it’s hard not to smile along as they wander down the forested path away from camp. Shikako had announced this morning that they were going to begin working on wilderness survival this summer. It isn’t an easy thing, leaving the city for so long._

_The well—_

_“Hey, none of that!” Akari taps her on the head with the makeshift arrow. “You need to pay attention. You’re going to be doing this on your own and the old deer won’t be so forgiving if you fail.”_

_“I was just thinking.”_

_“I get you don’t like being away from the well, but you get this look like something’s just killed your cat every time you think about it and it’s depressing.” She sighs, handing the barbed stick her way. “You can’t let it keep you from living your life.”_

_It isn’t that simple, she wants to say. She’s talked a little about that long year spent chasing after the Shikon no Tama. She’s avoided any names and did what she could to keep from mentioning that it occurred nearly five centuries ago. But Akari knows enough; she’s good about listening to what isn’t said._

_She doesn’t know his name. Only that he is a hanyou and that Kagome loves him more than there are stars in the sky. And that the doorway—the well—that allowed them to meet has been sealed shut. The temporal aspect of it has been avoided; as far as Kagome can tell, Akari believes the well functioned as the sole entrance to a type of warding used to hide youkai territories._

_“This isn’t a breakup. It’s not something I can just get over,” she says. It’s not something she_ wants _to get over. “So, bowfishing?”_

_The fox scowls, but lets it go. “Bowfishing. It’s probably the best bet for you, since you’ll always have—where’s your bow?”_

—The light is turning amber as she breaks the trees to find the shimmering water. She hasn’t gone very far from the house; Inuyasha really did choose a good spot to build.

It’s also a little sad, thinking about how such a beautiful spot is so close to the storeroom and she never knew. The city had erased this, the small rocky rapids leading into what looks to be a deep, slow pool. A good place for fishing. A good place for bathing, too, the water running crystal clear, light slanting sun warmth over the surface.

She looks down at the now-carved stick in her hand, sliding the knife back into its sheath.

But for a line…

And she left her bow behind. There’s a line attached to her quiver for this very purpose, as well as a proper bowfishing arrow, though in a pinch she could maybe use the tie holding her kosode closed. It won’t give her the right range, but she can always wade out to get closer. She just needs her bow, and not for the first time she is intensely thankful the bow from Mt. Azusa is what it is.

—

She left her bow.

And her arrows.

He growls low so as not to scare the children now gathered inside the little house. How he’d even missed Kagome leaving he doesn’t know. Damn monk had him too distracted helping manage the children once Natsumi decided she was hungry and got her sister and brother riled up.

He snaps up the bow and arrows without a word and stomps out, intent on finding his…Kagome. He’s looking for Kagome, the fool woman who wandered into youkai woods without her weapons. There’s a spot at the back where she’d leaned against the wooden wall of the of the house, the scent laced with stress and something like sorrow.

Sango had said she’d offered to go fetch fish for dinner. Some of what had been sent apparently couldn’t be stored and needed to be used sooner rather than later, and there’d been something about judging how Kagome’s cooking was and whether or not she’d need lessons with Miroku.

So fishing.

With what, he has no idea. He knows Rin is capable of fishing the way he does, by just wading in the water and using bare hands to pull the damn things out. Some of the village boys have tried mimicking it, but he can’t remember Kagome ever doing any kind of fishing before.

But she’s also had three years away from him.

He slows a bit, now fully into the trees, his hand going a little slack around her bow and quiver. 

She’s been worried about how much he’s changed, how much everything has changed. Does she even realize how much _she’s_ changed? He remembers her being confident and fearless, almost impossibly kind and loving. No matter what darkness he dragged her into, she was always the brightest star, chasing away the shadows with a smile.

The world had been cold and dark, without her.

When he’d caught her scent, he’d been half out of his mind. His senses had tricked him so many times in the past; he’d been terrified before looking into the well, half expecting to see oblivion instead of a familiar form climbing up the vines.

But it was her, she was real, not his imagination. To feel her against him again, to hear her voice, and that sweet scent like fresh water and plum blossoms—

He can still smell her. He’s on the same path she walked through the woods. He’d been meaning to show her the way to the river, but…

She doesn’t need him. She’d told Shippou she knew how to clean kills for food, and she found the river without him, and she apparently knows how to fish. He used to do all of that for her; remembers when it was him taking care of her. She looked after his wounds, yes, but more importantly she taught him how to be alive. In exchange, he’d cared for her as…

_“I must impart knowledge, mongrel. Do not ignore it.”_

He nearly groans. Of all the times—that conceited jerk’s attempt at…something. Family? Being an older brother? Picking up being the ‘father figure’ he’d failed at years ago when he’d abandoned a then still-small Inuyasha in the wilds because he apparently _forgot_? Why is he thinking of that nonsense now, of all times?

It had been maybe half a year after…just after. It was when Sesshoumaru decided Rin needed a ‘proper’ education and for some dumbass reason decided here was the place to do it. And after seeing to it that his little girl was settled in, Sesshoumaru sought him out for a talk.

Or, rather, _the_ talk.

Tried to have the talk, at least.

His brother had been on about some nonsense regarding courting rituals and some other bullshit that sounded made up at best.

He’s not a youkai, he’d said, none of that applied.

Sesshoumaru had just pointed out that he’s not human either.

That talk was never finished.

And then…

And then Takenosuke suggested building himself a house to work on his skills with a half-joke about his needing a home for…

He’d tried to not think about that asshole’s _talk_ while doing it, even as Sesshoumaru had wandered by once or twice and just given him a dead-eyed stare that spoke volumes.

Yes, okay, that bastard was part of why he’d reroofed the damn thing three times and redone the floors twice, and had switched out some of the furnishings more times than he cares to admit, but it was worth it to end the silent judgement.

So he’d built a house. That was mostly him just messing around and trying to learn, and also obsessing over the details and trying to remember the way her family’s home looked and tracing out steps around what would become the shrine to figure out a location…

It was for her. All of it. He’d even made an attempt at a garden to establish a better food source but then the seasons changed and just kept changing and she wasn’t there.

But now she is. He takes a deep breath. She’s near enough her scent is stronger, intense in a way only a long absence can do, and he can hear the sound of fabric rustling.

He adjusts his grip on her bow and arrows. He’s not even halfway through the next step when he feels the weight in his left hand change. Glancing down, he sees the quiver full of arrows, but no bow.

Where the hell is her bow?

He looks behind him; the small path between the house and the river is dappled golden light and vibrant spring greens, rocks and sticks scattered about small underbrush plants thriving in the canopy’s shade.

What there isn’t is the mystical longbow recovered from Mt. Azusa.

He knows he had it. It had been leaning against the wall by the front door and he’d grabbed it with every intent of tracking her down and reminding her to never leave alone without it and he’d had it not three steps ago.

Where did it even go? It’s not on the path, and he definitely didn’t throw it but he knows he had it. The wood always feels a little…odd. A lingering sort of buzzing against his skin. Not unwelcoming but something between a warning and a greeting. It’s just the bow’s power brushing up against his own, he knows that, and when did it fucking vanish?

_How_ did it vanish?

Does he retrace his steps or—no. The woods are still dangerous; he does his best to keep them clear of anything that might harm the village but things have been busy the last couple of days. He’ll catch the damn fish himself. That’s all there is for it.

The trees end abruptly not far ahead, revealing the river and—

Kagome. A haori matching her hakama has been splayed across a rock as she stands on the shore eyeing the water critically with her _fucking bow_ in one hand and what looks like a barbed stick in the other.

_What the hell?”_

She lowers the bow and looks back at him. “Inuyasha? What are—?” Three places she looks and he can see her slowly make the connection. The bow in her hand, him, and the quiver still in his hand. “Oh.”

“Yeah, _oh_ , what-how? I know I had that thing!”

“I can explain.” She drops the makeshift arrow; he recognizes the line from it now as one of the ties for her kosode. As she moves the fabric is just a little too loose, shifting enough to reveal more of the juban beneath it. It’s hard to think for just a moment. He’s still not sure what to make of the wardrobe change. The weird future clothes were familiar, firmly Kagome. But this? Seeing her in garments he can actually name and that make her look like she belongs here in a way she never quite did before—

Rather than fix her clothing, she steps over the rocks towards him, holding out her bow for him. “Just take this. I can take the quiver. And stay here.”

Okay, this is not what he was expecting. Not that he knows exactly what he was expecting. Kagome coming back was always a maybe; there were alternatives being planned out just in case. But once she was back?

(She’s back and he is still missing her.

He misses going for runs with her. Misses finding new places untouched by war or famine or whatever the tragedy that year is and seeing her awe. She’s an easy leap away and her scent strong enough, real enough, so intense he could drown in it. And she’s not what he would have guessed and it makes it feel like she’s leagues away.)

It’s still just too raw, too new, and he has to breathe deep to remind himself that she’s real and here and not going away.

She turns back to him once she’s reached her earlier position by the water. “Just stay there, okay? Make sure you can see both the bow and me.”

Weird, but okay. He holds the bow out enough to keep it in sight along with her. It’s just the bow—fading. Quickly, too, and he has the distinct feeling that she is slowing this down so that he can see it, and that raises the hair on the back of his neck because _power_ and _strange_. The bow in his hands fades away, fading back into sight in _her_ hands.

“What the _fuck_?” is all he can manage. 

Ah, there’s the Kagome he remembers, as she blushes and looks away, smiling despite it. Young, earnest, sometimes a little unsure even as she was more stubborn than was good for her. “The-you know how I can shoot around things? The whole making the arrow vanish and then reappear thing?”

“Yeah.” He nods slowly. He and Miroku once had a long conversation about that, after it hurt less to talk about her than it did to keep quiet about her. About those powers she began displaying in the end and what she might have been capable of once Magatsuhi’s seal was gone.

Vanishing _bows_ were never on that list.

She runs a hand across the bow, all reminiscing and horribly fond and—no, he’s the same about Tessaiga, ain’t he? “That’s my power. I’m the one doing it and I can do it with any bow. What you just saw is this bow’s own power. It doesn’t matter where I am, I don’t think. It’s found me even when I’ve been a day’s travel away.”

That…definitely not what he was expecting. It’s just another thing to get used to, now. She said she wants him and he does believe it. The well let her come back; that’s proof enough. And he—

He would have waited as long as he could have, and then talked to someone about sealing him for the remaining centuries between them. All the horrors in all the hells couldn’t have stopped him. It settles something in him when she’s near, a sense of security and _home_ that he’d been starting to forget. It’s still there, that near her is where he belongs and it is still very much where he wants to be.

And he does want. Even if they don’t stay here, even if they end up on the other side of the moon, he never wants to be away from her again. Even now, the distant sounds of the children currently in the house and it’s so, so easy to think of it as _their_ house now, that those bright laughs and high voices could be—

It’s only been a day, he reminds himself, taking a deep breath that is probably the worst thing he could have done. She’s so close and her scent so strong and the smell of his forest and Kagome blending together like she never left is enough to put a weakness in ‘round his knees. That distant too bright city is just a ghost of strange smells that seem almost familiar clinging to her clothes; beyond herself she mostly only smells like Shippou and himself.

It smells like _home_. Like _family_.

“Try not to forget the arrows next time?” he says, the words coming out a little reluctantly. It’s still there, the irritation that she wandered off into the woods without her weapons, but lessening slightly. She can summon the bow, apparently has the ability to craft her own arrows, and damn if this isn’t going to take some getting used to. “Where’d ya even learn to do this?”

He hops over towards her, taking a seat near where her haori is draped, hands tucked into his sleeve. Yeah, he’d been intending to just catch the fish himself, but this is not a technique he’s seen before and shooting fish out of the water still seems like it might be a bit much.

Then again, Kagome can shoot something without even really seeing it.

“Her name is Akari,” Kagome explains, selecting an arrow from her quiver that’s heavier than the others, lacking the fletching and looking like a more polished version of the roughly carved thing he’d found her with. There’s also a line unhooked from the quiver itself and attached to the arrow. “She’s—she will be a friend. She’s the one who introduced me to Shikako-sensei, and the one who did most of the survival training.”

_She’s—she will be_. That’s an odd thing. Kagome never used to struggle with the tenses in how she talked about people across the two times she lived in. She’d just as seamlessly talk about those three girls she grew up with as she did Sango and Miroku.

“What’dya mean _will be_?”

Kagome lifts the bow, strange arrow nocked and ready. “She’s only a little girl right now. A few decades older than Shippou, I think.”

The arrow flies true, line tracing out behind it. It sinks into the surface of the water to spur on a thrashing from—well, shit. She successfully shot a fish. Huh. The line attached to the arrow is still in her hand and she begins pulling it in. It’s a good sized fish, at that. Beyond the hole now in its side, that was actually pretty damn impressive.

And then it sinks in what she’d said.

_A little girl right now. A few decades older than Shippou_.

This Akari is a fucking youkai.

“What the hell, Kagome?” He’s on his feet, the rest of it falling into place. A youkai introduced her to whoever it was that did her training. This Shikako person, or whatever; he’d heard her talking about them to Sango, along with learning things from her mother and grandfather. There’d be nothing at all about any youkai. That had been one of the many things that made him uncomfortable on the other side of the well. In addition to the all the smells and noises, there were no youkai.

Okay, there is the Tatari-Mokke, but that thing’s not like him. Or even like Sesshoumaru, or Shippou, or even that damn wolf.

(It does hurt, a little, knowing that even in the future there are enough dead children to spawn that thing. He tries to not think about it, because he only made it through the last three years believing that era is a lot safer than his own.)

It had been an incredibly lonely feeling. For all that Kagome and her family had been right there, making him feel welcome, it never sat right that he seemed to be the only one of his kind.

“They’re not gone,” she tells him, setting the now dead fish on the rocks between them and preparing the next shot. “The youkai, I mean. They just live separately and if they are out and about it’s usually only the ones who can pass for human.”

“And you just happened to make friends with one? Was your teacher a youkai too?”

“Yes.” The arrow sinks into the water again. For a moment he thinks she’s missed, but then she’s pulling in the line and the fish becomes obvious. “When Akari found me, I was at archery practice and she approached me after asking if I could tone down the purification aura. I didn’t know how, so she took me to Shikako, who agreed that I needed to be trained.”

“That’s why none of those medicines are for people?”

He can feel his ears lowering at the look she gives him, the force of it making him sink back down to the ground. It’s a sad one, eyes dark with sorrow and her mouth turned down, shoulders slumped a little as her hold on the still-impaled fish slackens a little. “They are for people,” she says. “Just not for humans.”

“That’s not-”

“Do you think you’re not a person?” Kagome asks, setting down the second fish by the first. She doesn’t stand up after, staying kneeling down where she can meet him eye to eye. “What about Shippou? Or Sesshoumaru? Or Kouga? Or even that little green thing that followed Sesshoumaru around. Jaken, right? Kirara may not be a person in the same sense, but she’s still a living being and still deserves to be treated that way. Youkai are different than humans, yes, but none of you are invincible. There are still sicknesses than affect you, poisons and injuries severe enough you can’t recover without help—okay, maybe not for a daiyoukai like Sesshoumaru, but you get my point.”

“Not everyone sees it that way,” he grumbles, looking away. “An’ I do know that.”

The last four years have been interesting, to say the least. Years of being other, of being not youkai enough and not human enough to belong to either, and he woke up missing fifty years of his life to spend the next four years surrounded by a group of humans and youkai who didn’t see each other as being anything less than real. There’s not really any doubt there. Some of the villagers may struggle with it, but Sango, Miroku, their kids, Kaede, Takenosuke—they all treat him and Shippou both like they’re just normal.

But years and years of being called a monster. It’s still not easy, at times, adjusting to think of himself as a person in the same way a human immediately is. At least with regards to how other people see him. He himself has always known he’s a person, even when he didn’t want to admit it. Even when he wanted to become…

No, that’s not right. The kind of full youkai he’d wanted to be would still have been a person too.

“We’ll deal with them when we have to,” Kagome says. She stands, readying her bow for another shot. “You know I’ll never see you differently, right? Inuyasha is Inuyasha.”

She says it like she’s certain they’ll have to deal with it. That rankles a bit, because if he has it his way she will never have to. But he wants her with him too badly, and maybe he’s a selfish bastard for it, but she wants him too.

Only, it’s not just him. He doesn’t doubt that when she says _us_ she also means Shippou. And a hanyou is one thing. A full youkai is another.

“I know,” he says. “We need to finish our talk from earlier, don’t we?”

Kagome is quiet for long enough to pull in a third fish, and there’s a soft discussion about how many they’ll need to feed everyone before she answers. “Like Sango and Miroku, right? And everything that comes after.”

“Yeah.”

Like Sango and Miroku. It’s weird, thinking of it in other terms. Married, or whatever. It’s just them. Just wanting a future where they’re together. It’s wanting—there’s a peal of laughter in the distance and it nearly hurts, the _want_. Not an immediate want, either, just the promise of it.

Hope. That’s what it is. It’s hope that one day that could be theirs. It’s so different from the burning envy he’s had to stomp down every time someone in the village celebrated a wedding or welcomed a child or some other silly domestic thing he never used to think about. He’s had hope about it all along. He’d find a way back to her if she didn’t find a way back to him and they would have that, but it was always an abstract thing. Now it’s so real he can almost feel it.

And then there’s Shippou.

She pulls in a fourth fish. “We’re agreed we both want that, yes?”

“What’re we going do about the runt?” he says quickly. A little too fast, a little jumbled but she seems to get it. She smiles at him, that soft one that’s only ever been for him and it pulls up the memories from this morning, of having her so close and feeling her pressed against him and the taste—

“That’s sort of up to him, isn’t it?” Kagome asks, kneeling down again. “Whether or not he stays is something we need to talk about with him.”

“You still don’t mind then?” She was always so soft with the kid. Always indulgent, always trying to teach him manners. He’d been spoiled by her, yeah, and then she was gone.

_“I miss her too!”_

His ears flatten at the memory. Shippou had been in tears, screaming at him and it had been deeply unpleasant but it had helped. She was gone, and the kid still needed them and without her all they had was each other. It was in the quiet acceptance from the blacksmith down the road, who’d given him a knowing look when he first saw Inuyasha trying to teach Shippou how to hunt.

(It had been Takenosuke who quietly explained that the other man’s wife had died when their son was still very young. Which wasn’t something that had clicked, before. Inuyasha knew the blacksmith had a son, but no wife. Shippou’s breakdown had merely driven the comparison home.

That’s an ugly thing he doesn’t want to think about. Kagome wasn’t dead, just away. And she came back. She always comes back.)

“Of course not. I missed him too,” she says it so easily. Then she frowns and looks sad. Why? Why is she looking sad now? “I would have thought you’d have issues with it. Though I guess at the end...”

She trails off, eyes gone distant. In the hush he can feel the aura pressing down on them, the way even the wind felt sickly, and the fear tainting everything.

“Yeah.”

“You’ve done just fine as far as I can tell.”

She always did know what to say to make the heat rise up in his face. She’s smiling again, no sadness marring it, so he’ll count it as a win. She stands up, preparing to get the rest of the fish they’ll need.

It’s a natural thing, watching her do this. He’ll gut the fish when it comes time, and when they’re walking back with the cleaned catch, his heart will settle down and he’ll be able to think of things a little more boldly.

The word _wife_ still sits weird in his mind, but it’s a near thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Kagome joining the archery club and the other girls going WTF because here's this freshman that everyone says has been incredibly ill for the last year and she's somehow this wickedly good archer despite no evidence she's ever touched a bow before joining. We'll eventually get there. Someday. 
> 
> The bow teleporting came from something I saw while scrolling through tumblr. I can't find it again to credit who it was, but they were pointing out that Kagome didn't have her bow with her when she returned, but she had it in the Since Then chapter. I had already written the first couple of chapters for this at that point and established that Kagome did, at least in this 'verse, have the Mt. Azusa bow with her. But the image of the bow teleporting to her was just too good to pass on. Mystery poster, thank you!
> 
> Also, Inuyasha's POV is incredibly hard to do. Especially since he's still a little overwhelmed and his emotional regulation has never been very good. Sess's talk was less specifically youkai, and actually more in line with what would be expected for a human spouse: provide shelter, food, etc... Basically prove you can actually support a family. He and Inuyasha are both just really bad at communicating with each other.


	5. bitter darkness

“You’ve gotten better at this,” Miroku tells her after Rin and Sango have cleared away the dishes to be cleaned. It’d struck her as odd that Inuyasha went and odder that Shippou followed; she can hear them talking even though she can’t make out the words. Hisui is curled up asleep in the basket that had held the sewing supplies they’d brought over, the girls flopped over each other nearby in that kind of dead-to-the-world sleep only children seem truly capable of.

Which leaves her and Miroku seated on opposite sides of the hearth, the monk looking content in the firelight.

“Was that really about testing me?”

Miroku nods. “You’ve never cooked like this before. While Inuyasha is better than Sango, he’s not great at anything more complicated than camp food.” There’s a grousing outside, to which Miroku responds by somewhat raising his voice. “Nor is he the best at remembering humans need a more varied diet than youkai.”

“I have actually done this before,” she says. It’s more defensive than she means it, but it really is getting tiring. She’s already been over what she spent the last three years doing with Sango, and somewhat with Inuyasha. It’s touching that they’re worried, but really. She wasn’t totally helpless three years ago, and she didn’t spend those three cold years just doing nothing. “I do know what I’m doing.”

“We’re just worried,” he says, gently. Enough so she thinks he’s about to say something harsh next. It’s that same tone parents use and oh how she had forgotten what it was like to have an older brother looking out for her. She remembers using a similar tone with Souta. It’s been so long since it was last directed at her by someone who wasn’t Mama or Jii-chan.

“I do appreciate it,” she manages. There’s an internal struggle she hopes he doesn’t see, the one where she viciously strangles that burning desire to prove she’s not helpless and aims for deflection. “It’s just been a lot and there’s still so much to do. I still haven’t been through all of the seeds Kaede sent and those really need to be getting into the ground, and I’ll need to track down others—”

“Breathe,” Miroku reminds her. “One thing at a time. Those concerns can wait until tomorrow, can’t they?”

She does what he says and takes a deep breath, slowly releasing it. It’s nearing mid-spring already and the garden is a genuine concern. She remembers how rough that winter they were on the road was. But…tomorrow. It can wait for tomorrow. “Yeah, they can. You’re wanting to talk about something else, aren’t you?”

“Kaede-sama was wondering about your training, and I must admit I’m a little curious as well. You’ve clearly had some training, and Inuyasha tells me you don’t wish to be a miko?”

She bites down on the inside of her cheek. Not hard enough to draw blood, but it’s a near thing. It’s going to be like this, isn’t it? They all need to adjust; she’s had three years to adjust to being what she is, and they’ve had three years to adjust to be parents.

It’s just a learning curve. If only it weren’t such a steep one.

“My training wasn’t to be a miko,” she says plainly.

Miroku holds up a hand. “I don’t mean to offend. To be honest, this is probably for the better. Married miko are rather rare these days, and I can’t say the entire village would be welcoming to one in your exact situation.”

“You mean that elder who was talking to Kaede? Or is it the new villagers?”

“A little of both,” he tells her. “The southern end of the village is less inclined towards youkai in general, and while none are openly hostile, I can’t say they will stay that way. The fewer points of contention, the better.”

Akari’s quiet talks about what drove the youkai into hiding rise up. Kagome lets them percolate at the back of her mind, fishing for dates.

She’s never been entirely certain of the exact year she fell into so long ago was. She knows Oda Nobunaga is alive out there somewhere, not yet the man he will be remembered as, but how far off is that day? How long do she and Inuyasha have before—

The perils of time travel. Shikako had made it abundantly clear how dangerous time magics are, that the timeline itself can be imperiled with the slightest change. That the timeline can be ruthless in correcting mistakes when they do occur.

“They do know that’s not how this works, don’t they?” she asks instead. It’s easier, focusing on the married miko part than the rest. “That whole story about losing your powers, I mean.”

“Perhaps,” he concedes. “But there are still those who remember your predecessor and how her power was waning towards the end.”

Kikyou. He means Kikyou. Kagome takes another deep breath, the meditative kind, trying to still the roiling shadows that still linger over that… _that_.

“That had nothing to do with him,” she says, voice low and firm. She’d been confused about it as well, because while Naraku lied constantly, Tsubaki didn’t. Nor do, or at least did, the villagers.

Mama was the one who helped her understand what likely happened there. It probably would have happened to Kagome, were she to step into Kikyou’s role as a miko. That was the thing, though, wasn’t it? Kikyou hated being a miko, hated the position it put her in. She’d wanted nothing more than to be a normal woman, when she died. And that wish carried through. Kagome may have been born with the powers, but she had a normal childhood and it gave her the strength to say no when people tried to put her on Kikyou’s pedestal.

“We both know that,” he says. He tucks his hands into his sleeves as he settles in, the action a familiar comfort. It’s nice to see not everything has changed. Even though the flash of bare skin on his right hand startles her every time she sees it. “I must admit I am curious what exactly your training was like.”

And there’s the Miroku she remembers. Equal parts mature older brother, pious monk, lecher, and overly curious child. He’s better at hiding that last one, now. That spark of mischief isn’t quite as obvious as it once was, but it’s still there, hiding at the corner of his smile. “What do you want to know? There’s some things I can’t do inside.”

“Whatever you wish to share.”

Barriers, she decides. Long ago he’d tried to teach her, but whether the seal or something else, it hadn’t taken. Casting barriers for her is a strange feeling; like suddenly being dunked under sun-warmed water. It even splashes, slightly, up where it closes over her head. And actually calling them up is nothing like what Miroku had explained.

There’s multiple layers to the world, as far as she can tell, and she explains it as she goes. They vary for each person, maybe, and for her the layers can be described as other, outer, inner, and depths. Which is itself divided into mental, emotional, and the deep dark. For her the other is everything around her. Every shadow, every light, every beating heart, and every pulse of power foreign to her own. It’s Miroku’s steady presence ahead of her, Hisui’s nascent aura and Ayaka’s weaker one. It’s Shippou’s bright candlelight off to the side, nearly eclipsed by Inuyasha’s blazing star. And where…

It nearly breaks her concentration, realizing there’s an unknown there. It flickers, slightly, like a little lantern.

She pushes it away, focusing instead on pulling her own power up around her to cut herself of from the others. Separating other and outer first, then letting it flow back down along the inside to cut off outer and inner, sinking everything beneath that second layer into the depths.

It took her a long while, learning how to do that without losing herself in the currents and eddies. How to sink herself just far enough she can still see out, still tell what’s going outside.

The first time she’d done this…

_It’s just like being underwater. Not in a pool, or the bath. Not even like the dozens of rivers she dunked herself into over that long year in the past. It was more like that time when she was nine and her family had gone to the beach and she’d swam too far out._

_Everything’s kind of wobbly like that, too, the ripples moving through the air in lazy swirls. Even the light has taken on that filtered appearance, lancing through in shafts._

_It’s peaceful. Beautiful, even, the feeling of sheer tranquility washing over her. She reaches out a hand, watching as a bit of the light curls around it, the feel warm and…_ waiting. _Like it wants her to do something._

_She’d slipped in so easily, like it had been welcoming her in. When she comes out, it’s rough and brutal, leaving her gasping for breath and only dimly recognizing Shikako’s sharp-nailed hand on her shoulder._

_“Too deep, little bird,” the witch says. “You could drown doing that, and then where’d we be?”_

_“What was that?” Kagome gasps. Air burns in her lungs. She’s dry as can be, but the feeling of having been underwater is still so intense, so real, that absence of sound and air—_

_It was exhilarating in the moment, just a brief heartbeat when her fear of the silence was nowhere to be found, but now that she’s out she can feel tendrils of it curling up her spine, because the silence the silence; she thought she’d escaped it wasn’t the darkness, the Tama is gonegone_ gone _._

_“You need better mental shields, is what that was,” Shikako tells her, plopping down beside her, ornaments jangling. She pulls out a jade cigarette holder from her sleeve, then the case that holds the unusual cigarettes Kagome is fairly certain aren’t tobacco. The smoke is too sweet, too sparked like it just needs an extra push to become something else. “Time to change how you learn barriers, I think. Start internally then move external.”_

_“More waterfalls?”_

_“Only if you enjoy the cold.” Shikako grins manically around the cigarette, then sobers. “But you’re going to have start keeping up with your meditation.”_

_Kagome nearly groans. Meditation has been…unpleasant. Too much time alone with her thoughts, and she can’t completely clear them no matter how hard she tries. Every time she gets close it’s one thing or another. The Tama. The Infant. Tsubaki. “Is there another way?”_

_Shikako pauses to breathe in the smoke, blowing it out in rings. “There really isn’t. You need to learn to do this, little bird. That seal you were under must have been a nasty thing. You’ve got bits of foreign magic stuck all over you. Some of it looks harmless, but some of it is not. I was going to wait to work on this until you had things a little more under control, but something’s telling me your power won’t be so polite.”_

She comes out of the memory without missing a beat. Miroku looks enraptured by the barrier she’s brought up. It’s a simple one, only a shimmer in the air to redirect something that isn’t consciously trying to harm whatever’s inside.

“This is amazing,” he says. “I’ve never seen one come up like that. It’s just like a raindrop.”

She nods, keeping the barrier up. “It feels like water, so it’s easier to treat it like water. Or expect it to behave like water.”

“You were talking about layers earlier.” Miroku leans forward, eyes narrowing to focus on the magic shimmering around her. “Does that mean you can layer barriers?”

“Hang on,” she laughs. “It’ll be easier to show you.”

Denser, this barrier is. It slips through the air to partition the world as she wishes. Unlike the first layer, this one is meant for conflict. Or, rather, to escape conflict. It hides everything of whatever is inside: sight, sound, smell—

“Kagome?!” Inuyasha’s through the door nearly as soon as the barrier seals. Hisui lets out a plaintive sound that nets Inuyasha a vicious glare from Miroku. She drops the barrier a little too fast for safety, the splash of power knocking her off balance enough to make the world spin.

She smiles a little sad when he mumbles an apology, ears flattening against his head. He looks like panic and it pulls fiercely from behind her ribs, an intense desire to be alone with him so she can crawl into his hold and pretend the outside world doesn’t exist for a moment because right now with the world swimming ‘round the edges of awareness and it feels like a bit like a dream. And that saps what little energy she has, leaving her feeling drained as the world begins to right itself.

It’s been a long day.

A long two days, really.

It’s really only been… _oh_.

By this time yesterday she’d been back here, the sun having already set and herself tucked into Inuyasha’s hold as they both collapsed a little under the weight of reality. But yesterday she’d woken up five hundred years in the future, and gone through a long, long day with no hope only to find the sky again.

Only to see everyone again, after thinking she never would again.

“Shit,” Inuyasha says, still quieter. He’s over to her quickly, hands on her face and oh, she’s tearing up again. “Quit that, okay? I’m sorry. You disappeared an’ don’t do that again, okay?”

“It’s not that,” she says gently, reaching up to anchor herself. She’s unable to thread their fingers together like this, but the feel of knuckles too fine for a hand so strong is enough. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I was only showing Miroku how I cast barriers, since mine are different than his.”

The barrier blocks scent. She really, really should have thought that through better. She knows how much he relies on his sense of smell, knows it is the sense he hates losing the most when the moon goes dark. It’s not so different, is it, from the bone-deep fear she still has when in total silence?

“I think it is perhaps time we went home,” Miroku says, gathering up the children. She hadn’t been aware of Sango coming in behind Inuyasha, and only manages to see the last of the tension bleed out. “We can continue this another day.”

Rin ducks in after, making a beeline for her after gathering the basket Sango had brought. “Can I come help with the garden tomorrow?”

Inuyasha makes a noise at that, but Kagome is already nodding to the girl. “That would be helpful. Thank you.”

There’s also a promise from Sango to get together after things are more settled. By the time the children and everything is gathered up, the night has swallowed the forest whole. Too dark to be walking all the way from here to the village, and so it is decided Inuyasha will go with them, just to make sure they make it back safely.

Kagome follows them out; there’s still the dishes to finish, after all.

Shippou is nodding off by the time she finishes putting away the dishes, only sleepily able to tell her where things go and yawning every three sentences. She leaves him nodding off by the fire to find where his bedding is. Sango had helped her set them up to air as best they could by the windows, muttering something about getting a laundry line up as soon as possible.

There’s a simple quilt for Shippou, small and patched. She runs a hand over it, wondering who did the stitching. It’s a brightly colored thing, of greens and blues, pinks and vivid whites, and it looks well-loved. She brushes over a rough yellow fabric along the edges, almost like—

It’s from her old bag.

She hadn’t even thought of that thing. It had been left behind, and after three years she’d simply forgotten it. Now that she can see it, though, she can see the rest of the fabrics in the blanket for what they are. Patches of green from a spare skirt she’d kept on hand, checked pinks from her pjs, and a deep blue from what had been one of her favourite blouses.

Tears burn at her eyes. She hadn’t noticed any sign that she’d been here, so long ago. It was so, so easy to think things were that easy, even when she knew they weren’t. 

It hurts; an ugly wailing thing behind her ribs. At the same time, it smooths away some of the pain. They missed her too, just as much. She knows she made the right choice, in coming back here to stay. It eases something, awful as it is, knowing that they did miss her as much as she missed them. That the last three years were cold for more than just her.

“Never again,” she swears, voice low so as not to wake the boy as she tucks him in, pressing a kiss to his forehead. “I’m not leaving again. I promise.”

She tries her best to ignore the way her power is near singing _this is right this is true_. It’s a loud thing, her power can be, when it’s trying to tell her something. Mama had teased her for it, when she tried explaining it. Something about teenagers and the sheer relief when they finally listen.

Mama rarely paused, when it came to learning what that year had really been like. Kagome never told her _everything_. Some things are just too—that evil baby, the Shichinintai. Most of the Kikyou story, for all that Mama got simultaneously more and less than what Sango or even Inuyasha knows about it—there were just some things that it never felt right to burden her family with. Finding out her daughter and her merry band of misfits had somehow adopted an orphaned kitsune kit was taken in stride.

(The one thing that well and truly got a reaction from her mother was that long talk through the night after her first day with Shikako. It’s apparently one thing to reconcile the idea of your only daughter with a time traveler in love with a half-youkai boy from five hundred years ago. It’s apparently quite another reconciling that same child with something powerful and dangerous.)

_“I never expected you to have a normal life, Kagome,”_ was all Mama had ever said about any of it.

She picks up the light, padding out of the room as careful as she can. The fire is burning low in the hearth, more embers than anything. So warm, it looks. The kind of warmth that feels like home, for all that this place is still new to her.

This is her home, now, isn’t it?

Home is such an abstract thing, these days. It wasn’t a lie, that she’d be happy anywhere, so long as she could stay with him. Home is him, is Inuyasha at the core and wider is Shippou and Sango and Miroku. Mama and Jii-chan and Souta, too, but they’re home in the way the safe harbours of childhood always offer sanctuary.

But this home is the promise of tomorrow. It’s the promise of a life she wants, of a life on her own terms, of a life where she doesn’t have to hide.

She stands in the hush of the night, heartbeat-flicker flame in her hand and the embers of a dying fire all there is for light. She doesn’t have to hide anymore; she’s never thought of it that way. But she was hiding, these last three years, wasn’t she?

The house is quiet, but not silent. There’s the rustle of leaves in the wind, and the distant rush of the river tumbling over rocks at the falls. Every now and then a bird calls out in the dark. She’s grateful for the noise, stepping into the other—her bedroom? Their bedroom? By Inuyasha’s own admission he never really stayed in here, and she remembers him sleeping sitting against the wall or in trees more than anything else. She knows he does sleep. She’s seen it enough times to know that. They’ve even shared a bed on occasion, when he’d be in the future and doze off while she was studying.

It just wasn’t…like this.

Thinking of this as _their_ s brings up all the things her mind has conjured over the last three years. Every desire, every longing, every dream that left her frustrated and heartbroken in equal parts.

For a moment she just stands at the door, breathing in and out. Centering herself, reigning in the fear of the dark and the heat coiled low around her spine. All the contradictory things racing around that collectively say she is far too tired to be doing much of anything right now. Slowly the lightning thoughts come to an end, and she moves to put the candle down on top of the drawers, sliding open the one she’d claimed for her clothing.

For a moment, it feels like she’s back in the future. It would be like this, exhausted in ways she didn’t think possible as the day catches up. Probably one of the ones where Shikako decided to tackle some of her nightmares from the Shikon no Tama, given the emotional exhaustion that’s sinking into her muscles as she moves to untie everything and shrug out of her day clothes.

She hesitates for a moment. Even so tired, she’d always kept Mama’s insistence on cleanliness at the forefront. Always be clean before bed, always put the laundry away, even if the exhaustion is melting her bones into nothingness. None of her clothes will need cleaning immediately; she didn’t do much of anything today.

Still, she goes into the main room to fetch one of the larger baskets to use for laundry, and a small basin of water with one of the linen rags Sango left. It doesn’t take long, cleaning herself up and folding her day clothes to replace with a plain blue yukata.

It is still firmly springtime, and so the night is chilly and the water on the rag leaves colder trails on her skin. She can feel the brush of youki against her senses as Inuyasha crosses what she guesses is the forest’s edge. A stray thought crosses her mind, whispering that she doesn’t have to tie the yukata closed just yet, but she strangles it before it can go any further.

It’s too soon, too fast even though it’s been four years and there’s not anything stopping them now, is there? They both want this, both want everything that comes with being—and there’s the rapid thoughts again.

Kagome sighs, and secures the yukata closed.

—

He walks into the room just in time to see dark hair cascade down from where she’s had it pinned up and it sends out a wave of scent with the action. The still fading future scents, the remains of the soap she must have used yesterday morning barely threading through herself and the forest and too faint hints of him. It was intense by the river, but in here where the walls close it in and let it linger?

She’s going to kill him, isn’t she?

It was enough a shock seeing her dressed like she was earlier today, like she belonged here, but this...

She looks like a— _fuck_. Like a wife. Like she’s home and she is home, right, she does belong here but what in all the hells was she thinking giving up that too-loud city where everything was so certain and where she had a family and prospects that could actually give her the life she deserves—

Nope, not thinking that.

It’s just a lot. A lot really, really fast, because she was one way for so long and then gone for longer and now she’s back and it’s something weird. Both the same and totally different. There’s moments where it’s like she was never gone, and then there’s moments where the loss is all there is.

He’s seen her in sleeping clothes before, as weird as they were. And in far more revealing things, and even without a stitch on her. And in nothing but his fire rat and oh how that image haunted him in all the best and worst ways.

But in a simple yukata, the indigo bringing out the deeper colours in her hair and has she always looked this good in blue? Has she always been this, oh what’s the word? Ethereal? Stark white skin and tangled blues bleeding into the shadows, she looks like she could be a youkai, like this. A haunting from the depths of his mind and he has to take in a deep breath to remind himself that she’s real, that that’s a heartbeat he can hear, that she’s here and not gone.

“Oi, let me,” and he curses himself because why did he say that, why, dumbass why. She’d been working through the ends of her hair with a comb that really isn’t meant for that, the teeth too wide-set. Not that there’s really anything else in this place; he and Shippou both have claws for this and hell this means—

He’d only wanted to break the quiet.

She turns and looks at him, comb held apart from the hair pulled over her shoulder and yeah, the blue of the shadows curling in around the dim candlelight and the deeper indigo of her yukata makes the blue of her eyes all the more intense. Nearly inhuman, like it isn’t something anyone would see as strange for her to be here like this with him.

She’s beautiful, like this. She’s always beautiful, always has been like a sucker punch to the gut when she turns her full attention on him. It really doesn’t help that after three long years of her scent slowly fading-fading-gone from everything that it’s now so intense it nearly eclipses everything else. And reminds him that she doesn’t quite smell right, not the way she should, the way she did, back when she smelled like…like…

Like him. Unmistakably like him, where no one with a decent nose could think her belonging anywhere but with him. It’d been something he was so used to, their scents twisted together into something that said _home_. It’s not there yet, for all that he can catch bits of himself and there’s the scratching need to touch her, to fix this, to make this better.

_Fuck_.

He tugs on her arm a little, taking the comb from her and setting it down by the candle. It’s not a useful thing, that comb; why didn’t she have a brush with her? The stick she’d been using to hold it up all day sits beside it, simple and wooden and polished smooth from lots of use. He can remember his mother’s combs, beautiful little things meant for decoration but also some with function. All the pretty little things, silks instead of rough linens, and all he can give Kagome is a mostly-empty house in the middle of a forest at the edge of a village that only sort of tolerates him.

It doesn’t take much, getting her over to the futon where there’s better light for her to see, away from those miseries. It’s when she settles herself damn near in his lap that he freezes, desperately trying to think of literally anything but her scent and the cool softness of her hair, or what the skin of her thighs feels like or—

Oh hell, he should have let her finish with the comb.

“Inuyasha?” she says, voice full of concern. “Everything alright?”

No, no it most certainly isn’t _alright_. Actually it is, but it’s too alright and he feels like he’s burning but the idea of taking off anything he’s wearing to try and let the cool air in feels like a very bad idea.

(Or a good one. It could be _very_ good one.)

Her hair is still a bit unruly, just as it always was. But it’s heavier now, as he pulls it around towards the back where he can see it, curling slightly from where it was twisted up all day.

“It’s gotten longer,” he manages and it’s so lame he braces for the call out.

But it never comes. “Yeah. I felt like a change and either I could cut it all off or I could grow it out.”

Grow it out? It has, yes, the fringe that used to make her look so much like—like Kikyou—had already lengthened enough that that mistake was nearly impossible to make. Now it’s nearly gone; three years of growth blending it in with the rest.

“Besides,” she continues, giggling a little. “It was never fair you had nicer hair than me.”

He pauses, one hand already tangled in the waves at the bottom of her hair. “Wait, what?”

“It wasn’t fair,” she repeats. “Do you have any idea what it looks like when you’re standing in the wind? I could never decide if I was jealous or if—well, the only thing I could do anything about was the length and I really didn’t have the time to get it cut all that often.”

She’s babbling. Her heart has picked up too, beating away at a faster pace as her breath comes in a little shorter. He can smell it too, the tension putting a sour twang onto her scent, layered over the barest hint of something deeper and headier that he is pretty sure would strangle him if it were stronger.

Hair. Right. Hers and new growth and he slowly starts to work through it, careful to not cut anything when he finds a snag. It’s beautiful, of course it is. Black like night; deeper shadows that turn blue in the light. It feels like water against his hands; with each pass that river blossom scent ripples through the air.

“Mine just does this,” he tells her, talking mostly to keep himself occupied. “It’s always been like this.”

“Even when you were young?”

“Yeah. Just made me stand out more.” If it wasn’t the colour, it was the length, or the ears perched on top. This isn’t exactly _better_ , talking about this and all the ways the world tries to remind him he shouldn’t exist, but it has his blood cooling fast and that’s a small victory. It’s easier to focus on keeping his claws angled right as he moves up towards her scalp, when he’s not thinking so closely about her.

“You shouldn’t listen to what people like that say.”

“Heard it long as I can remember. Not easy to forget something like that.” And there’s the bitter. The ugly bits that remind him what people will think of this, of them. It’s the voices of the same bastards who robbed his mother of what little peace she had without her guardian around.

She pulls away a little, turning enough to look at him. He’s still got a hand in her hair, the strands soft and cool against his skin. So light and different from the heaviness he’s used to from his own. So perfectly suited to her, and a reminder of how much she, for some reason, trusts him. That she would sit in her sleeping yukata and let him paw through her hair, and never once think it wrong.

It was easier to not think about this when she was gone. That she had a life that could promise so much and that she might someday chose to leave it for him when he could offer her nothing but a promise of…of what? He threw himself into the Shikon no Tama for her, and he’d do it again, do anything to keep her safe and stay with her because he is that selfish. He has so little to offer her, so little to give, and for some reason she keeps choosing him.

Even to the point of giving up everything.

She really is going to be the death of him.

“They’re all wrong,” she says, reaching up to trace along his jaw. There’s something in the way she’s looking at him that has that dying fire flare up again, the memories of her skin slinking up to the surface and her scent is—

Her scent is taking on that something deeper again, this time stronger and it swallows him up, drags him down into her orbit until there’s nothing but her. Her heart’s beating stronger, louder, and his picks up to match it.

He wants to kiss her again. It would be so easy, this close. The runt’s asleep, and at this hour no one’s going to brave the woods to reach here unless they’re really desperate.

There’s time, now.

And then she pulls away to yawn. 

_Fuck_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy new year, y'all
> 
> My notes for this chapter were "somehow get into Kagome's power" with no real direction. I don't think I like the end result, but it does the job it was meant to do. 
> 
> Also in case anyone is wondering, that little lantern is Rin. She does have some power in this, albeit not much.


	6. little white lines

“Oi, kid, whatcha doing here?”

Kagome looks up from where she’d been clearing out a garden plot. Rin is bouncing her way down the forest path, alone, a basket swinging from her hands. She exchanges a look with Inuyasha; they’d sent Shippou into the village after breakfast to find Rin and figure out when she was planning to come over. And to escort her. Kagome can already see the annoyance building up in Inuyasha, his hands tightening around a wooden post.

“Something wrong?” she asks, voice low enough to not carry.

“She shouldn’a come out here alone. Forest’s not as dangerous as it was, but she’s still a kid,” he grumbles. The post is lifted up and stabbed into the ground with a little more force than necessary.

“Another pair of hands is not a bad thing,” she reminds him. They do have a somewhat impressive to-do list, after all. She’d been stressed about the garden, because that one was time-sensitive, but beyond it there’s still all manner of things that need doing: they need a clothesline, which is what Inuyasha is currently setting up, and there’s going to need to be a small storeroom where she can put pickles and miso and the few potions and like that need time to make and are, while fermenting, very unfriendly to youkai with sensitive noses. They’ll also need a few odds and ends to make sure she can cook when winter comes, as well as so much sewing.

Her own clothes are good enough she won’t need much of anything. But for all that Inuyasha loves to point out his fire rat is self-cleaning and self-repairing, she did enough mending during their travels to know the same is not true of his underclothes. Nor is it true of Shippou’s clothes, bar the fur he wears wrapped around his torso.

They’re lucky, she thinks, that Shippou doesn’t do much that could damage his clothing.

And blankets. The one Kaede sent is both too small and too heavy for anytime but winter and very early spring. She’s put it away for now, in case they ever have any guests. Shippou has the patchwork one made of her old clothes, but two nights now she and Inuyasha have only had his suikan. Which is warm, the fire-rat comfortable and perfectly serviceable to cover the both of them.

Still.

She’d like to have at least a dent in that to-do list by the time summer rolls around.

Rin plops herself down on the ground, basket settled on the porch near the bowl Kagome had sorted all of the seeds into. “Ri- _I_ like gardens. They’re easy, but everyone already has theirs.”

“The plan for today is just prepping the space and starting…” Kagome trails off. Starting annuals, is what she was going to say, and is what she intends. She doesn’t know why, really. Mama always insisted on starting perennials first, since they often take longer to grow. It just feels wrong, when she thinks about which plants will go where and she tries to think of perennials. There aren’t that many, anyway. Least not in the things Kaede and Sango have given her. There’s still the things she needs to go hunting for but, no, that feels wrong as well.

She sighs. Meditation will need to happen. Somewhere in the timestream, she expects Shikako is laughing.

“Vegetables, herbs,” Rin lists, sounding a little put out as she pulls at some weeds and carefully sorting them into two piles. “Do you know how to make medicines like Kaede-sama?”

Kagome pauses. Inuyasha has been splitting his attention between what he’s doing and them since Rin settled in, but now he slows to a stop, ears turned fully their way.

Rin would have possibly heard that she wasn’t trained as a miko, but the rest was said just between herself and Inuyasha. This is the first time someone else will hear this. Inuyasha took it surprisingly well, but what about everyone else?

“Sort of,” she starts. “There are some things I need to start, and others I’ll need to gather in the wild.”

“That’s not an answer,” Rin says, face scrunching up. It looks almost silly, this girl in a too-nice kimono kneeling down in the woods pulling weeds and looking offended. This all likely looks silly. A visibly non-human man with his sleeves pushed up and hair tied back trying to set up a clothesline and a young woman wearing hakama but not as a miko, and then a little girl in silk.

“I don’t know many for humans,” Kagome explains, focusing on pulling up the last of the plants in her space and shuffling over to the next section. “Only a few.”

“Rin can help with that.” The girl grins, suddenly, bright and victorious. “If you teach Rin to help youkai.”

Kagome blinks. That wasn’t exactly where she expected things to go, and a quick look over her shoulder shows Inuyasha not even attempting to hide his interest anymore. He meets her glance and just shrugs, mouthing something that looks like _that conceited asshole_.

Ah. Rin is the ward of a daiyoukai, so perhaps this isn’t surprising. Kagome can’t exactly imagine Sesshoumaru injured or ill. There’s also Jaken and that two-headed dragon in his group, and she also struggles to see Sesshoumaru stopping to care for them if one or both are needing help. Should something happen, they would need _someone_.

And Rin is effectively family. If she’s going to train anyone, why not her?

She sits up a little more fully. “Alright,” she says, “I can teach you, but we’re going to do this right. First, we need to finish this.”

By the time they do, the sun has risen to near noon, the forest bright and cheery with the light. Inuyasha has finished the clothesline and disappeared off to find their wayward kitsune and resume the kit’s hunting lessons. She and Rin set out the seeds without burying them in the places they belong to. The girl is very, very good at this, thinking through which plants need what and which ones protect others like it’s easy.

Jii-chan would like this girl, Kagome thinks. She wouldn’t make a mess of his vegetable patch the way Kagome herself did that first year. She’s also a gifted teacher, patiently explaining things in a way that’s easy to understand despite her young age. She could be so much more, Kagome thinks, if only she were receiving an education beyond what she can learn in the village.

Which is something Kagome can help with.

And Rin did ask.

“Like this,” Kagome repeats, drawing out the characters beneath the third set of seeds they’ve placed down. “Try again.”

“Why?”

“I told you, if you’re going to learn from me then we’re doing this right.”

“No one else has to learn this,” Rin complains as she painstakingly tries to recreate the lines in the dirt. Kagome looks back at the other two, the hiragana now resting beneath the freshly planted seeds. The first is obviously shaky, the kind she’d expect to see from a much younger child. The second is still a little too crude, but Rin is improving at keeping the lines steady. It would be better with a brush and ink, if not for the smell.

She nearly sighs. That will be a bridge she’ll have to cross at some point, finding ink and paper in this era.

“Better,” Kagome says, making a small correction when Rin takes a stroke in the wrong direction. “Do you want to be like everyone else?”

That makes Rin stop, stick still in the dirt and half-way through the final stroke. “Sesshoumaru-sama wants me to learn how to be human.”

“You’re already human,” Kagome says.

“He said that I needed to learn so that I could choose if I wanted to live among youkai or humans.”

“Honorable, but that is not how this works,” she says, mostly to herself. Kagome makes a mental note to have words with Sesshoumaru, because that is really, really not how this works. “I was a little confused by that. If he just wanted to see to your education, there are better places for you to be.”

“But not as safe.” Rin nearly bites down on the words, like she could make them disappear if she could.

“Maybe not.” And she has family here, but that bit Kagome holds back. Please don’t let Inuyasha argue with her on this. _Please_. “Do you like it here?”

Rin finishes the character in the soil. It’s good enough and so they plant this batch before moving to the next set. “I don’t know,” the girl finally says. “I think Rin is supposed to.”

“You can’t force yourself to like something you don’t,” Kagome tells her, gentle as she can. This is a feeling she knows well, she wants to say. It was like that every day she was stuck in the future. She knew she was supposed to like it, and sometimes she even did, but overall she really just…didn’t. “That’s part of being a person. You don’t control what or who you like. It just happens. What you do have control over are your actions about it.”

“So if Rin—if _I_ —don’t like living in the village?”

Kagome carves the name of the next plant into the ground, kneeling down to Rin’s level. “Well, the first thing I’d do is break the question into smaller pieces. What is it about the village I don’t like? Is there anything I do like? Is there anything I can change to make it better? If the answer to that one is no, then I’d start looking at what I needed to do to leave.”

Choosing between youkai and humans? She is fully aware she is likely the worst person to have this conversation with, because her choice is _both where possible_. Groups that are fully human are uncomfortable, in part because there’s only so many times she can be called some variant of _youkai’s whore_ before she’s constantly on edge around humans. Fully youkai groups are less stressful, if only because she’s more used to them now and she has, strangely enough, often found youkai to be less abrasive. Even when they’re about to kill.

Blended groups, though, blended groups are safe and peaceful.

And Rin? She doesn’t know Rin well enough to really say much about the girl’s past, but given that Sesshoumaru took her in and is acting as a guardian even if he hasn’t outright adopted her says _likely orphan_ and one for whom living among humans was untenable.

After all, if Rin had living human family who cared for her, why wouldn’t Sesshoumaru have just left her with them?

It only took a year for Kagome herself to become uncomfortable without the presence of youkai around, and she had a solid upbringing and the promise of a secure future. Rin had been, Kagome guesses, either six or seven when Sesshoumaru took over as her guardian. That’s young. That’s _impressionable_ young. And unlike herself, Rin was not in a mixed group, except that short time at the end when Kohaku had been travelling with them.

“Has anyone been giving you trouble?” Kagome asks, thinking back on what Miroku said about the far end of the village.

Rin starts on her version of the word, holding the stick with both hands. She finishes the first stroke, looking up at Kagome with a question. Slowly, Kagome traces over her original writing, showing the direction and order of the lines.

“Not really,” Rin finally says. “Some of the grown-ups say mean things, but they’re mostly about Sesshoumaru-sama, not me.”

“Are the other children mean to you?”

“Rin has Shippou and the twins.”

Kagome breathes out, centering herself and letting the flash of anger and old hurt wash away with the breeze. “That’s not what I mean. Do you have any friends your own age?”

“Kohaku visits sometimes,” Rin says. Her writing is passable, so they plant this round and move to the next one. “But no, not really. I think the others are afraid of me.”

_Probably_ , is what Kagome thinks, but she doesn’t say it. Rin is living with the shadow of Sesshoumaru over her, and likely the shadows of Inuyasha and the rest of them. That’s a formidable clan, if that’s how the village is viewing them and, all of them lacking blood family except to each other, is likely exactly how they’re being seen. Jii-chan had explained this, hadn’t he, about how families used to work and clans and all that?

Rin’s position in the village will be determined by her clan. As will Kagome’s own. That could go very wrong, a clan in which the official head is…Sesshoumaru.

Kagome squashes that thought with extreme prejudice. Miroku will know more. She’s already promised to visit Sango once things settle down. It can wait until then, she tells herself.

One thing at a time.

—

Inuyasha and Shippou return with some rabbits in tow just after the sun passes its zenith. The two children are set on preparing vegetables on the porch and their laughter filters through the windows, clear as sunshine amid the forest’s hush.

“What do you know about Rin’s life in the village?” Kagome asks, once she’s certain the children won’t hear.

Inuyasha scowls at her over the hearth, poking at one of the logs until it catches. “Not much. She stays with the old woman or Miroku and Sango, helps out with Kaede-babaa’s chores, helps with the twins, sometimes goes to the lessons all the village girls go to.”

“Any friends?”

“Who’s gonna be friends with a kid that asshole hovers around?” She turns, ready to snap, but the look on his face stops her. It’s the same expression he’d get whenever his childhood came up, and not for the first time, she wonders what the history between the brothers really is. She hasn’t forgotten that somehow Inuyahsa knew who Sesshoumaru was, and well enough for them both to be familiar with each other, despite claiming he grew up alone. “She hangs out in the forest a lot, even after being told not to. I’ve seen her ‘round the tree, an’ there’s a meadow with flowers she likes out towards that damn cave.”

_That damn cave_ —Kagome nearly slices into her hand, the knife glancing off rabbit bone as her attention slips. “You don’t mean Onigumo’s cave, do you?”

“She knows not’ta go there,” he says, poking at the fire once more before standing and heading her way. “Kid’s got good instincts. What’re you on about? She say something?”

She lets him take over the rabbit butchering, moving down a little to give him some space to work while she starts preparing the meat. It’s strange to be doing this in a house, rather than around a campfire. Stranger to be doing it with him. A new experience, even as she settles in to his presence and the way it feels like home. Domestic, that’s what it is.

This is the new normal, she reminds herself. This is her life now. This is what she left the future for.

She’s seen flashes of this before. Never for very long, but little things like him trying to hunt in Tokyo or bringing her medicines and staying with her until she fell asleep, or covering her with a blanket when she fell asleep at her desk. Even carrying her home, sometimes from school, sometimes from whichever battle it was that week.

It’s nice, this is. Being calm and not fighting. Just _living_ , together and at peace. She misses travelling, and misses it just being the two of them, but this is nice too.

“Not really,” Kagome says. “I don’t think she’s happy, do you?”

“You’re worried.”

“Yes.”

He slides her the next rabbit as she finishes with the first. “Ya know you can’t fix everything, right? You’ve only been back…”

“Two days,” she finishes, when he trails off. Two nights she’s spent in this time, but only two days. She’d arrived in the afternoon the first day, just before evening, then there was yesterday, and it’s only early afternoon today. Two days. Two nights. “I know things are still settling, but Rin’s a good canary.”

“A what?” He shakes a little, and it takes a moment to realize he’s trying to get his hair out of the way, some of it having fallen over his shoulder to trail across the worktable every time he leans forward.

“A canary,” she explains, rinsing her hands off to help move the offending lock out of the way. “It’s a bird that some places used in mines to detect poisons. It was meant as a way of knowing when a place was unsafe.”

“You’re worried about that now?” He scoffs, claws flashing in the shadows where the sunlight doesn’t quite reach through the windows. “Some of the villagers are assholes, but it’s been three years and they haven’t done anything.”

“It’s not them I worry about,” she says, not looking at him. There’s so much sitting on her tongue, about the purges, about the fear that traced Akari’s every move when in public. “Did you ever wonder what happened to youkai, on the other side?”

He shrugs. “You knew youkai over there, didn’ya? Everything was noisy and it all reeked. It’s not that surprising I never noticed them.”

“Two higher level youkai, Inuyasha.” How to make him understand without scaring him? “And both capable of passing for human when they want to.”

“That’d be needed, right? S’why you kept hiding my ears,” he says, flicking them for emphasis.

“It’s more than that. There’s this group,” _there and now_ she wants to say, but bites it back, “that are determined to purify all youkai. Youkai are in hiding, in my time, because the alternative is war.”

He’s stopped moving, and he looks beyond her, over towards the door where Tessaiga leans against the wall. “Never known youkai to hide like that.”

“This group is different,” she explains. “They’re from the south, near the capital, and they did at some point succeed in driving youkai out Kyoto and several other regions. I don’t know when but they come north—”

“The youkai went north too?” he asks. He won’t look at her, mouth curled down and gaze far away.

_Oh no_.

“It’s already started, hasn’t it?” It was always a risk. She knows the two events were likely close, given everything she knew. It’s just that there were three years she could have been here, living happily in the village the way she’s dreamed and instead she’s been dropped into this.

Breathe in, breathe out. She leans a little into his presence, grounding herself in his warmth. Shikako’s lectures on time magic and how carefully it must be done— _“And it should never be done at all, little bird, do not forget that!”_ —and Akari’s few stories from her childhood and the changes that had pushed her from her birthplace near Nara to Tokyo.

“Dunno,” Inuyasha says, and she can’t bring herself to believe it. It’s the tone, the way he still won’t look at her, ears and shoulders both curved down. The air’s gone heavy, sunlight not quite reaching them in the noonday shadows. “Maybe. When’d all this happen?”

“I’m not sure. There was a calendar change between now and when I was born,” she says. He looks at her askance, eyes narrowed and ears uneven. For a moment she’s equally confused, until it clicks. “I mean the way we count time changed. The new moon isn’t the first of the month in my time. We use a solar calendar instead.”

She thinks back to history lessons in school, all the dates and names. Most of her schooling had focused on the latter half of the 1500s, and the battles that created the world she was born to. She’d tried so hard to gather every scrap of information she could, scouring over her notes to find some trace of her own story until her vision went blurry. Guns were introduced in…1543? Right? Ginkotsu had been dead for fifteen years upon his resurrection so assuming he took to firearms immediately—unless his weapons were based on canons instead? The only actual guns she remembers seeing were those with the men Jakotsu killed. And the earliest date she can remember for Oda Nobunaga is 1560.

The year of the Shikon no Tama was pre-1560, she knows that for sure. Oda Nobunaga exists, but he wasn’t the man he will be remembered as.

(The three years she missed mock her. This could be after 1560, they tease, because she _wasn’t here_.)

“I don’t know when this is, but best guess is sometime around the 1550s, on the modern calendar,” she explains. From outside, she can hear Shippou’s high voice in a storyteller’s cadence, and Rin’s laughter after one particularly loud part. “I need to talk to Miroku anyway, he and Sango may be able to help me sort out the timeline. All Akari could remember about the move north was that it was just before—before this era’s end. It was just before that. Which could be years from now, or has already happened or is just happening.”

Shikako’s warnings about timelines and messing with things and paradoxes comes back to her, strangling the words of what happens at the end of the 1500s. She can’t reveal too much, can’t intervene, can’t…do much of anything really. Which is fine by her; she came back to live with Inuyasha and to just be as normal as a hanyou’s partner can be.

It’s just that he is a hanyou. That Shippou is a full youkai. That the movements happening against the backdrop of those battles puts them in more danger than anyone else and she cannot lose them again. Not again, never again.

“You think we’re gonna have to leave, don’ya?”

She could lie, she realizes. She could tell him no, they’ll be safe, they can stay because this is where they belong, but oh how that feels bitter and broken-glass sharp _wrong_ against her throat.

“Yes,” she says, voice so low that there’s no way the children just beyond the door can hear her. “I just don’t know when.”

—

He’s noticed, of course, that she’s been jumpy about anything suggesting permanence. Except him, and them and being together. It’s been easy to see it as the same fear he’s been trying to ignore, that this is just a tease, just a dream, that anything could happen and she’ll vanish again.

He’d be lying if he said the thought of leaving the village sounded awful. He doesn’t want to leave this weird family they’ve got, the monk and all of them. He wants to see the kids grow up, wants—wants them to know any kids that might come later. Together, all of them, in their village. The first place that’s really been safe, been home.

But at the same time, getting Kagome as far away from the Bone Eater's Well as he physically can sounds like the best idea ever. Even the tree, as precious as that place is, is a connection between the eras and he really, really doesn’t want her near anything that could take her away.

Lunch went easily enough; the conversation mostly went around trying to teach Rin to read and write, and gardening, and some other shit he never really considered before. It’s still weird, sitting in a house that’s actually his, and with a family and it is so, so easy to sit there with the three of them like this is every day.

Could be, actually, given that Kagome seems determined to teach Rin.

He sighs, leaning back against the tree he’s perched himself in. The light’s gone golden where it filters through the leaves; it’s that time of day when the village quiets down and the forest breathes a little easier.

Ears twitch as the sound of light footsteps, lighter than they used to be, approaches. He cracks open an eye, peering down to where teal hakama are visible just beyond the leaves. “I thought Rin was stayin’ later,” he calls down, shifting to put his arms behind his head.

Kagome walks fully into view, hair pinned up and a length of twine in her hands. “Shippou took her back to the village. She has some chores to finish up there.”

“Why didn’ya walk her back yourself?”

She’s said she needs to talk to Miroku and Sango again, but she’s made no indication of wanting to go into the village. It’s all fine by him; he avoids the village most days too. It just don’t sit right when it’s Kagome. She’s always been lively and social and so eager to help. It’s strange with her apparently content to just stay here. With him.

This is going to take some getting used to, isn’t it? Every time he stops and thinks about it, it seems more and more unreal. Like there’s no way she’d just leave everything like that. Not for him. No one would, and the Kagome he remembers was a bubbly girl, not this woman with sadness tinging her scent and panic sitting just below the surface.

She takes a deep breath. She’s got that look she used to when she was about to do something bold; better than the annoyed look she’d get before sitting his ass.

“Shippou and Rin are both gone, Inuyasha,” she says, voice low enough it won’t carry but loud enough he can still hear her clearly. “We’re alone now.” 

He jumps down, careful of the tree roots. “What’re ya thinkin’ about?”

“Well, first I’d like to get measurements so I can get some sewing started.” She gestures to the length of twine he can now see looped around her shoulder. “So turn around and arms out, please.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, complying. Miroku made him do this once, after coming back from an exorcism with Sango. It’d not been an easy one, and the fire-rat had only just regenerated by the time they returned. Kagome pushes his hair over his shoulder, little hands dancing across his back as she holds up the twine to make knots to mark distances.

It’s when she moves to the front and pushes his arms down, wrapping twine around his neck that it finally clicks that _they’re alone now_. Actually alone. All he can hear are the skittering of little forest critters and the wind through the canopy. They are alone, for the…what, fourth time since she returned? It’s not really been that difficult to find time together, has it?

She’s so focused on making the knots in the right place, biting down on her lip and blue eyes narrowed in concentration. Again the word _wife_ floats to the surface of his mind. That’s what this is, isn’t it? Miroku and Sango aren’t normal, he knows that. Sango wasn’t raised to be a wife and Miroku had to take care of himself and Mushin. He’s seen other village women and their husbands, is vaguely familiar with how things work.

His real experience is pretty much ancient history now, back when his mother was alive and he saw the cloistered families in the compound where they lived. Most of the women there had servants to do everything for them, and only ever seemed to be pretty things to decorate the men with when needed. His mother was the afterthought, though she’d still had help of a sort. Still been dressed in silks, even those that were maybe a bit old and that she had to patch up herself.

It wasn’t great, but it was still more than what he can give the woman in front of him.

“You don’t have’ta do this,” he mumbles.

“Why not?” She pulls the string away from him, moving to wrap it up and tucked it away in the folds of her kimono. Linen, looks like. Not the silks she deserves. “It needs doing, so why not now?”

He sighs, tugging her close and resting his forehead atop hers, just breathing her in for a moment. “We’ve time now, don’t we?”

It’s bitter, that is. Time has been his enemy for longer than he cares to admit. It’d been a brief blessing when it brought her to him, but then it’d taken her from him and brought changes in the people around him like happiness and little ones and still she wasn’t there.

Time’s taken a lot from him. His mother, arguably his brother because that asshole has never been able to tell time, and someday it will take Kagome from him permanently. He’s aware of that, knows full well that odds are she will be old and grey before he’s had a chance to age even a decade.

A growl builds up somewhere deep in his chest, dark and frustrated. He doesn’t want to think about that, not now, not when he’s just got her back. He remembers his mother, how she’d faded so fast and he knows that’s nothing for him and that Kagome is human just like his mother—

“Inuyasha?” She keeps her voice soft, not too loud, as she always has when this close after she figured out just how sensitive his hearing is. Such a little thing, like this is still a dream because how can she still remember that? How can she be back at all, when time is never on his side? “What’s wrong?”

“Nothin’.”

She sighs, a little puff of air against his chest. “That wasn’t a happy sound. Something’s bothering you.”

“D’ya ever just wanna stop?” he asks. She doesn’t pull away; that’s all that matters. He’s not holding her overly close, just a hand on her wrist. She could step away any time, but she doesn’t. “Like we used to. Remember sitting in the trees, watching the sunset? Or the stars?”

There it is. He doesn’t want her working like this, because their time is limited. That’s what it is, and all the gods help him because he doesn’t know how to say that to her. He only just got her back, and he doesn’t want to lose a moment of this. Can’t. Not…he’d been too little, to really cherish what time he had with his mother. To even be aware of how it moved differently for him than it did for those around him.

He can’t repeat that with Kagome.

It takes a moment to realize she’s gone tense, a shudder in her breathing, all the lines of her body gone rigid. It’s not quite the same as when the runt screamed and she’d panicked, but it’s a near thing.

Oh hell, what’d he say wrong this time? She’s here, and she said she wanted him and wanted to be like Sango and Miroku and that means—does she not want that after all? But—

“I don’t-I can’t-it doesn’t go well, when I don’t have something to do.”

He breathes in deep, her scent overwhelming the forest, and it helps. _Home_ , it says. “What’s that mean?” he asks, trying to stay calm, stay steady while she’s not.

“I think when I don’t work,” she says, tucking herself closer to him and that definitely helps settle the last of the panic, because she’s not rejecting him. She’s—hiding. That’s what this is. She’s tucked herself against him with her face hidden, the top of her head sitting just below the curve where his neck meets his shoulder. “Does that make sense?”

“Kinda,” he answers, breaking just a little bit. “I did that too. How d’ya think we got the house?”

She laughs. It’s not quite a happy thing, but it’s not hollow either. He’s ready to count it for a win when he feels the tears, a heartbeat before the smell of salt hits.

Well, shit. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I didn’t mean to leave.”

“Neither did I.”

She sniffles once, pressing closer and it’s so, so easy to wrap his arms around her. She fits against him perfectly, warm and alive and safe. But hurting. She’s hurting and he doesn’t know how to help her, because this isn’t the kind of hurt that can be fought or treated with bandages or potions.

It’s just…time.

That’s what Sango said, at least, one long moonless night, between the end and this beginning.

“You didn’t have to wait.”

“What the-,” he chokes, a little, pushing her out enough he can tilt her face up see the tears welled up along her lashes. She’d said it so quiet, and if not for the fact that she’s so close a leaf couldn’t fit between them and there’s no one else around, he’d doubt he heard it right. “What kind of stupid is that? Of course I did! You always come back, so I’ll always wait!”

For just a moment, it’s like she doesn’t believe him. But something gives and her eyes clear, just a bit. “I do, don’t I?” she says, a little awed. “You’ll really wait for me?”

“Always,” he promises. “Have a little more faith in me, _please_.”

She goes quiet, just blinking up at him like he’s something precious. She’s got one hand still held in his, the other curled up near her chin, a flash of white teeth as she bites down on her lower lip again. That burns somewhere low, winding its way under his skin because he remembers that. Remembers all the times she did it and how he wanted to…to kiss her. To bite her. To do a lot of things he really shouldn’t have been thinking.

But she’s here now, and they’re like—she’s said she wants to be like Sango and Miroku and that’s married and that means he’s allowed now, right?

He swallows down the desperate, and leans down enough to just barely brush a kiss at the corner of her mouth.

Once upon a time, Kikyou had kissed him not far from here. She’d been cold and hard, no give to her clay body. She’d had no heartbeat, no scent beyond that of corpse and graveyard soil. It was, in hindsight, not an enjoyable experience because now that he’s learned what it can be—

Kagome is soft and warm and she’s as passionate as a thunderstorm. He’s barely pulled away from her before she’s pulled him back in, the contact like lightning through his veins and there’s her scent, taking on that headier turn that says _want_. And there’s her heartbeat, rapid rabbit flutter as it picks up pace and she wants and he wants and it is so, so easy to do this, to be punch-drunk on her. He releases her wrist, just lightly dragging his claws up her arm, across the lines—

A feeling like ice water down his back hits, all the heat strangled on the inhale as the memories come back: the sick feeling of walking on flesh, of feeling his body move and having no control, of Magatsuhi and Naraku and that fucking jewel.

“Inuyasha?” Kagome pulls him back, just like always. There’s concern in her eyes but they’re still full dark for desire and it’s an incredible feeling, knowing he can do that to her. But it’s also a wretched, ugly thing, knowing he can do _that_ , because he knows those lines beneath his hand, knows they match up to his claws perfectly because he’s the one that put them there.

She breathes in sharply, eyes flicking to her arm. He can feel her just starting to move away from him, and he tugs her right back, pushing up the sleeve to see how bad it is.

Three white lines cut across her skin, just above the elbow. They’re delicate things, slender and perfectly spaced, curling from front to back along the outside of her arm. Carefully, so careful to keep the tips as far from her skin as possible, he lines up each one to each of his fingers and remembers coming back to himself and the burning bile on his tongue because that was her blood on his fingers, dried on the undersides of his claws and by the time he’d had a chance to wash it off she was gone and he couldn’t bring himself to wash away any trace of her.

But it shouldn’t have marked her.

“Don’t,” she tells him, “don’t blame yourself for this.”

“I _hurt_ you.” Horror claws at his insides, tearing up everything. He swore, he _swore_ he would never do that. Promised he would protect her with his life and then…did _this_. “Why would you come back after that?”

“Inuyasha, stop,” she says. “Please don’t blame yourself for this. Do you know how many times I’ve reached for those scars? Every time things got difficult and it felt like everything was a dream, it helped me because it reminded me that you exist.”

_Oh_.

Well. That takes the wind right out of him.

“You found youkai over there, didn’ya?” he grumbles, hand still over the scars. He wants to run, but there’s a voice that sounds a lot like Sango saying that’s a bad idea. “Akari, right? And your teacher?”

“Shikako,” she offers. “And yes, I did. But they weren’t there for everything.” She reaches up to cover his hand with her own. “And they weren’t you,” she adds.

“I-fuck, I woulda found my way back to you,” he admits. Lying’s never been his strong suit, after all. Someday he’ll learn how to deal with this, maybe. The way she makes him so strong he could fight a god and win, and at the same time make him so weak he has trouble standing.

Sesshoumaru once called him pathetic, _moping_ , waiting for her by the well.

Asshole wasn’t wrong.

He needs her, simple as that, and he’s probably the worst thing for her.

“We’re a mess, aren’t we?” Kagome says. Gods help him, but she’s smiling and it’s a happy thing. A little watery ‘round the edges, but it’s a kind of happy and that’s all that matters.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did I really name this chapter for Kagome's scars? Yes, yes I did. She has others too, but so far has managed to keep them covered. 
> 
> And we are to the transition chapters where we start moving into the actual plot! For all that this...doesn't really have a plot beyond "life, but magic". And eventually Rin will stop speaking in third person and consistently use first person. Eventually. Just need to socialize her a bit more. 
> 
> Also I told myself that chapters 7/8 would be an exorcism where some of Kagome's new skills could really come through. Yeah, so much for that. They're probably going to be chapters 11-13ish at this rate.


End file.
